Nvidia’s $500 billion AI infrastructure push leaves crypto compute further behind

Nasdaq-listed chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA), the bellwether for everything AI, is pushing Wall Street banks to treat its AI computing power like commercial real estate, toll roads or power plants: as an investable infrastructure asset.

Nvidia said Monday it has signed memorandums of understanding with six Wall Street heavyweights – Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR – to set up financing platforms that could eventually tap more than $500 billion in third‑party capital.

The goal, according to the chipmaker, is to treat AI compute as a bankable infrastructure asset rather than a pure tech expense, encouraging customers to build out AI data centres and lock in demand for Nvidia’s hardware.

“This is really the first time that technology chips have become an investable asset class. These are revenue-generating assets now. They’re productive, they’re long-lived, they’re fungible, they’re flexible,” Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s founder and CEO, said.

“Fundamentally, what’s different about this industry and this way of doing computing is that the computer is now part of the infrastructure, like electricity, like the internet, and so you have to think about it like it’s infrastructure,” he added.

What’s AI compute

AI compute refers to the raw processing power used to train and run artificial intelligence models. Specialized chips, mostly Nvidia's high-end GPUs, primarily do that work and make up the large data centers that Nvidia calls "AI factories."