Nvidia has recruited Wall Street to bankroll its own customers.
The US chipmaker said last week it had signed memorandums of understanding with Wall Street’s largest asset managers, including Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR to raise upwards of half a trillion dollars for AI companies to borrow against, money that will buy its chips and build the servers that run them.
The six firms will set up what Nvidia calls “compute financing platforms,” drawing on institutional money, insurance funds and private credit. Borrowers can use the proceeds for the chips as well as servers, networking equipment, buildings and power supply.
Nvidia has the option to guarantee up to a quarter of any given deal, which lowers the interest rate its customers pay while leaving most of the credit risk with the lenders.
CEO Jensen Huang said he approached only these six companies and none refused.
Keeping that spending off their own books is precisely the point, and the fact that such a structure is needed at all tells investors a great deal about where the constraints in the AI boom now lie.
The financial engineering rests on a single reclassification. Graphics processing units (GPUs) have always been treated as equipment that loses value quickly, superseded whenever a faster generation arrives.
Nvidia is effectively asking lenders to treat them instead as long-lived infrastructure, closer to a toll road or a power plant, that can be borrowed against for years.
“These are revenue-generating assets now,” Huang said, describing them as productive, long-lived and transferable between customers.
The timing reflects a squeeze that has been building all year.
Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and other hyperscalers whose cloud platforms host most of the world’s AI workloads have together guided roughly $720 billion (€624bn) to $745 billion (€646bn) of capital spending in 2026, an increase of about 77% on last year.
What analysts expect the hyperscalers to spend in 2027 alone has more than doubled in the space of a year, from a consensus of $480 billion (€416bn) in August 2025 to $1.08 trillion (€943bn) this month, a rise of about 127%, according to Bank of America.
The pattern has repeated at every stage.
Analysts who already considered last year’s investment unsustainable then watched the hyperscalers guide higher at the start of 2026, revise those figures upward again through the year, and pencil in larger sums still for next year and 2028.
Moody’s has warned that spending on this scale is eating into free cash flow and pushing tech groups into heavier borrowing. Alphabet recorded negative free cash flow of $5.9 billion (€5.1bn) in a quarter when it spent $44.9 billion (€38.9bn) on projects.
That is the pressure the structure of Nvidia’s Wall Street deal relieves.
Debt raised through these “compute financing platforms” sits with the financing vehicles rather than on a hyperscaler’s own accounts and also has Nvidia’s backing, which protects credit ratings and leaves room for conventional borrowing elsewhere.
For smaller operators the effect is larger still as companies such as CoreWeave and Nebius, which lack investment-grade ratings and pay dearly for credit, gain access to capital on terms previously reserved for the giants.
The reaction was more ambivalent than the headline number suggests, and came weeks after a July selloff driven by doubts over whether AI spending will pay for itself.
Essentially, equity investors saw a bottleneck being cleared while credit investors saw something else: the cost of insuring Nvidia’s own debt against default rose after the news and has roughly doubled since late May.
Their doubt concentrates on the reclassification previously mentioned.
“Chips depreciate fast and lose value the moment a newer generation arrives,” warned Nigel Green of financial advisory firm deVere Group, noting that lending against them only works if the collateral holds its value.
Critics also point out that Nvidia is helping finance purchases of its own products, deepening the circularity that already worries the sector.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon called it “a pivotal moment of a historic AI investment cycle.”
Whether it proves pivotal in the direction Solomon means depends on a question nobody can yet answer: what will the value of a current GPU be in five years?
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images News
OpenAI (OPENAI) CEO Sam Altman agreed with Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang that open models are important to help the U.S. win the artificial intelligence race.
“I want the US to win in AI both in open-source and proprietary models, and
Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang speaks to reporters after arriving at Gimpo International Airport in western Seoul on Friday. Photo by Yonhap
Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jensen Huang said Friday that he views robotics as the next major growth sector in South Korea, adding that the domestic market is well-positioned for growth.
Huang, a central figure in the global artificial intelligence (AI) boom, made the remarks after arriving at Gimpo International Airport in western Seoul aboard his private jet for a four-day visit.
“(South) Korea has many sectors to invest in. Robotics is going to be the next major sector,” Huang told reporters, adding that the Korean “market is doing very well.”
Asked whether he had brought any gifts for South Korea, Huang responded with a smile.
“Did I bring any gifts for Korea? I brought a lot of business for Korea,” he said. “I have some surprises.”
The trip comes less than a year after Huang’s previous trip to South Korea in October, which coincided with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in the southeastern city of Gyeongju.
During that visit, Huang drew widespread attention when he joined Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung for a late-night meal of Korean fried chicken and beer, commonly known as “chimaek.”
One of the most anticipated events during Huang’s visit is an informal dinner with SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo and Naver Chairman Lee Hae-jin. Hyundai Motor Group’s chief who had earlier been expected to join the group has since confirmed he will be unable to attend.
Together, the companies represented at the gathering span nearly every layer of the AI value chain, including semiconductors, data centers, AI models, software and robotics.
Huang is also set to hold talks with executives from the gaming industry, AI and robotics startups, university researchers and students, according to industry sources.
“Because Korea is a manufacturing center of the world, we can apply the robotics technology, the physical AI technology that we invent here for the industry,” he said.
He further said Nvidia will partner with domestic manufacturing firms in robotics and AI.
“The manufacturing of semiconductors will become increasingly robotics and increasingly AI driven in the future, and so we have a great opportunity to partner with the semiconductor companies here as well,” he added.
Later in the day, Huang visited an internet cafe in Seoul and met with esports players, including gaming superstar Faker.
“This is the birthplace of esports,” Huang said, emphasizing that Korean gamers have long been among the world’s most competitive players who are using Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs).
Nvidia’s GeForce graphics cards are designed to deliver the high frame rates demanded by professional gamers.
Huang is also expected to meet Krafton Executive Director Chang Byung-gyu and other senior executives from the gaming company, though the exact schedule has yet to be confirmed.
The two companies are expected to discuss potential cooperation involving Nvidia’s RTX Spark platform for premium Windows laptops, as well as physical AI technologies.
Earlier this year, Krafton established a robotics subsidiary called Ludo Robotics.
During his stay, Huang is also expected to meet Science Minister Bae Kyung-hoon to discuss cooperation in AI, including the supply of GPUs.
Details regarding the timing, venue and agenda of the meeting are still being finalized.
Copyright (c) Yonhap News Agency prohibits its content from being redistributed or reprinted without consent, and forbids the content from being learned and used by artificial intelligence systems.