In some quarters, the words “artificial intelligence” have never been less popular, as many worry about job losses, environmental impacts and plain old uncertainty.
Not so on Wall Street, where six giant asset managers, private-equity firms and banks came together on Monday to announce an effort to raise $500 billion to keep fueling the A.I. boom by financing more data centers, power plants and chips.
The firms — BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and KKR among them — said they were working together to come up with that huge sum to lend to Nvidia’s customers, including the start-ups that use the company’s chips in data centers to develop and operate A.I. software.
These customers, Nvidia said, have been struggling to secure financing for chips and data centers. Nvidia will connect its customers with one of the six lenders, which will provide financing that could range from loans to credit. The financing will be “at attractive rates,” Nvidia said in a blog post.
Executives from the lenders joined Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, for an unusual, extended interview on CNBC, where they talked up their new, seemingly insatiable desire to finance infrastructure for A.I.
“It’s a hefty price tag,” Mr. Huang said on the air.
He said “A.I. labs” and “A.I. start-ups” would have access to the financing. He did not name those companies or whether Nvidia would receive any money as part of the effort.
“We need to raise this money as fast as possible,” said Larry Fink, BlackRock’s chief executive. He also stated: “There’s quite a bit of negativity around A.I. and data centers right now, but let’s be clear: This is going to be creating a huge amount of jobs.”
David M. Solomon, Goldman’s chief executive, said the consortium was Mr. Huang’s idea.
The announcement punctuates a head rush on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley into anything that even vaguely resembles A.I. The stocks of tech giants and chipmakers have soared for most of this year, and a pair of the biggest names in the space, Anthropic and OpenAI, are expected to file for initial public offerings that could value them at $1 trillion apiece.
But plenty of questions remain about the cost of the boom and whether there will be enough demand for computing power to support all of the data centers under construction. Indeed, Nvidia stock dipped modestly on Monday after The Financial Times reported that the company was nearing the mammoth financing deal.
And while the contours of the arrangements were announced Monday afternoon, details remained scarce. A joint news release referred only to “memorandums of understanding” to “create dedicated pools of capital at significant scale.”
During their television interview, the lenders’ executives alluded vaguely to “yield-based products” and even securitization, or the creation of bonds that would divvy up the revenue from A.I. labs into risky and less risky categories. There were several references to A.I. as a new asset class and to allowing smaller investors an opportunity to invest in debt backed by the data centers.
“This is the very beginning — like what it was when I started in the mortgage-backed securities market in the 1970s,” Mr. Fink said. “I look upon this as a next future for financial engineering.”
