Nvidia’s new financial strategy does not compute
| Source: The Verge AI
Tags: Nvidia, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, GPU financing, Jensen Huang, compute asset class, neoclouds
Nvidia and six major financial firms — Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR — are structuring $500 billion in financing to make GPU compute an investable asset class, with the CEO comparing the move to the 1970s mortgage-backed securities market.
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Jensen Huang is betting that GPU compute can be financialized like real estate or commodities. Nvidia has partnered with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to create $500 billion in financing structures that let neoclouds acquire more chips — framing GPUs as revenue-generating assets that are long-lived, fungible, and flexible. The framing is striking given that Huang said last year that Hopper chips were barely worth giving away once Blackwell arrived. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink drew an explicit comparison to the mortgage-backed securities market of the 1970s — a comparison that drew immediate concern from financial commentators, since that experiment eventually produced a crisis. The critical risk: AI data center capacity is expanding rapidly, Chinese open-source models are reducing compute requirements per inference, and frontier labs' ability to sustain revenue remains unproven. If demand plateaus or contracts, GPU-backed financial instruments could face serious stress. Silicon Data projects rental prices will continue rising through 2028, but one cloud provider reportedly nearly doubled prices on Blackwell B200s at contract renewal — a sign the market is already straining.