Business Insider Huang took to X to tout a major partnership with Wall Street titans to finance AI infrastructure, noting that AI compute is a burgeoning asset class.
- Jensen Huang touted Nvidia's AIcomputeas a distinct asset class as it partners with Wall Street giants. - The chip maker this week announced a partnership with top Wall Street firms to finance AI infrastructure.
- Huang said Nvidia AI compute is a financeable, revenue-producing asset class for investors to consider.
Nvidia's Jensen Huang sees company's AI compute as a burgeoning asset class for investors to consider.
The Nvidia CEO took to X on Monday to tout the partnership between the chip titan and some of Wall Street's biggest firms to help finance a $500 billion build out of AI infrastructure. The partners include including Apollo, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, KKR, Blackstone, and Brookfield.
"AI has reached an inflection point," Huang wrote. "It is moving from research into production. AI is creating real value, and the infrastructure behind it is becoming one of the world's most productive assets. In AI, compute is revenue."
Compute refers to the physical infrastructure needed to train and run AI models, but Huang wrote that it includes more than the company's coveted GPUs. The asset class he envisions is the entire infrastructure stack, from the racks to the factories to the networks and the software that tie it all together.
As investors have rushed to pour money into the companies powering the AI boom, compute has emerged as its own commodity, with some tech firms considering including it in compensation packages. Investors recently cheered a move by Meta to sell its excess compute to other users.
Huang's thesis centers on presenting Nvidia's compute as a financeable, revenue-producing asset that can hold its value over the course of its life.
"These are the characteristics of an investable infrastructure asset," he said. "It produces revenue, serves a broad market, improves in performance over time and can be redeployed."
The new financing partnerships are addressing a problem that Huang sees in the AI market. He added that while demand for AI infrastructure remains highly robust, access to capital is far from even, making it difficult for many tech companies to scale their operations due to a lack of affordable financing for AI deployment.
"With these partnerships, NVIDIA and the world's leading financial institutions are creating a new way to finance the infrastructure that will power this industrial revolution," Huang said. "We will make AI factories more accessible to the companies, industries and nations building the future."
The deal-making frenzy to finance all of this in the last few years has made headlines, while also raising questions about the shaky nature of circular financing, as hardware firms like Nvidia invest in companies that will turn around and buy things like GPUs from them. Huang said that the partnership with big Wall Street firms is meant to address those concerns.
"The demand is real: it comes from frontier AI labs, AI-native startups, enterprises, cloud providers and countries building AI services," he wrote. NVIDIA provides the platform; the investors make independent financing decisions."
The CEO also addressed the question of what the return on these investments in financing AI compute will be. He answered that the return is "the usefulness of AI," highlighting the potential he sees for the technology to continue transforming the economy.
Nvidia's new partnership with Wall Street comes as investors have increasingly been questioning the timeline for tech companies to monetize their AI investments. In Huang's view, they should be focused on the big picture of what AI can become if the buildout continues.
"Companies are using AI to write software, discover drugs, design products, serve customers, automate operations and build new services," he said. "AI factories make this possible. More compute creates better AI; better AI creates more usage; more usage creates more revenue; and more revenue drives more compute."
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