Nvidia to Team With Wall Street on $500 Billion Funding Package

A group of US investment giants are nearing a partnership with Nvidia Corp. on $500 billion in funding for the buildout of AI infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter.

Apollo Global Management Inc., Blackstone Inc., BlackRock Inc., Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and KKR & Co. are among the firms in talks with Nvidia on the investment, said the people, who asked not to be named because the information isn’t public. A deal may be announced a soon as Monday, they added.

Representatives for the firms either declined to comment or didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. The Financial Times earlier reported on the lending effort.

Nvidia shares extended declines in US trading. They were down 2.2% to $219.01 as of 1:32 p.m. in New York.

Nvidia has already inked hundreds of billions of dollars worth of deals with companies across the AI ecosystem, stoking concerns from some investors that the chipmaking giant is inflating demand and valuations across the industry through the circular nature of such agreements.

The AI chipmaker has been in talks to backstop as much as $250 billion to help OpenAI lease computing power from a US data center project in what would be among the chipmaker’s biggest financing deals with a customer. A deal would help the ChatGPT creator lease capacity at the $500 billion, 10-gigawatt hub that SB Energy, a SoftBank Group Corp. subsidiary, is developing in Ohio, Bloomberg reported last month.

Nvidia was also in discussions to finance $350 billion of OpenAI’s purchases of its chips for the project, people familiar with the situation said at the time, asking not to be identified because the talks were private.

It wasn’t immediately clear which projects or companies the funding would back, the nature of the funding or whether the $500 billion represented new commitments or already existing ones.

Nvidia has accelerated its investments and partnerships with tech and AI companies in recent months despite growing concerns about its “circular” deals.

In addition to the OpenAI financing talks, the company last month expanded a partnership with South Korean conglomerate SK Group and said the companies will be doing more than $500 billion in business with each other. It also made a “substantial” investment in Safe Superintelligence Inc., the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.