Nvidia's $500B Bet on AI Compute: Can It Outlast Aging Hardware?

Nvidia is pushing Wall Street to treat AI compute as a new asset class, aiming to raise over $500 billion in funding for AI 'factories', data centers that train and run AI models.

These facilities are seen as an 'investable asset class' by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who argues that they continue to earn revenue and can be reused across multiple customers.

The harder question is whether the hardware ages faster than the loans are paid off, and who takes the loss if it does.

Nvidia has partnered with six firms, Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR, to create financing platforms for AI compute infrastructure.