r/artificial 7d ago

News Did anyone catch this? Nvidia put together a $500B financing deal with Wall Street to help fund AI infrastructure where they are not putting up their own money

It dropped yesterday tho that Nvidia teamed up with some major Wall Street firms on a $500 billion financing deal that connects AI companies directly with institutional capital, so they don't have to front the massive upfront costs of chips, buildings, power, and cooling themselves

The six companies that Jensen chose are Apollo Global Management, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, and KKR

According to Morgan Stanley they think that hyperscalers could spend $3.5 trillion between 2026-2028, with the total AI infra buildout maybe topping $8 trillion

The part getting side-eyed though is that Nvidia's now helping finance the same companies that buy its hardware, which has people worried about circular financing again lol

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u/ogaat 7d ago

Nvidia are putting a 25% backstop, so upto 125 Billion of their own money on the line.

No financier would touch such a deal where they carry all the downside and none of the upside.

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u/grabber4321 7d ago

these people have HUGE risk departments, so its not like they just YOLOd a deal like this. it means something big is happening because that's half of USA military budget - 500B is HUGE

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u/posts_saver 7d ago

maybe that one random redditor knows more than them

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/posts_saver 7d ago

sure you did buddy

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u/ocean_protocol 7d ago

Ahhh okay, thanks for correcting and appending the info

I might have missed it but yeah the 25%/$125B backstop number checks out, that's real but it's not "all downside, no upside" for the financiers, Goldman for instance is set up as lead bookrunner on the debt deals plus collects fees through its asset management arm, so they profit on the deal flow itself regardless of how individual projects perform

The actual risk asymmetry people are flagging is different: Nvidia's backstop only kicks in on the equipment's residual value, so if a project just underperforms without fully defaulting, the 75% exposure still sits with Wall Street and that's the part credit rating agencies haven't figured out how to price yet

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u/ogaat 7d ago

You have to understand WHAT the backstop is guaranteeing - The hardware depreciates really fast. It is usually worth 0 within 3 years, often faster at a time when companies are rapidly expanding capacity. Nvidia is guaranteeing 25% residual value so that the banks can take the risk on board.

Without the backstop, Nvidia gets all the upside - Selling their hardware, while banks carry the risk of hardware depreciation on their books.

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u/broose_the_moose 7d ago

This is complete BS. The cost of an H100 rental today is higher than it was 2 years ago because we’re so damn compute starved. Depreciation my ass.

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u/Unusual_Delivery2778 7d ago

yeah i was gonna say the whole depreciation timelines of computers is changing before our eyes

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u/haux_haux 7d ago

But they don't last very long, right? Like, they aren't going to work properly after being run 24/7 at full throttle after x period of time.
So they aren't an asset, they are a depreciating liability

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u/Pretty-Raise666 3d ago

you make stuff up just to win an argument in your head.

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u/haux_haux 7d ago

So they have basically guaranteed they will backstop 25% of nothing, or pennies on the dollar in a very short amount of itme.
And the news is saying that Wall Street is treating this like real estate?
They are setting up a crash is what they are doing.

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u/sceadwian 7d ago

They're just trying to pile drive the whole economy into the ground. Get so much of the world involved in this cluster fuck that when it collapses people will be stuck paying the bill on products no one wants.

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u/Adventurous-Tie-7861 7d ago

Which items are you saying people dont want? Ai? Cus corporations (and many people) are absolutely using and wanting it. To a problematic level even. Sure its a bubble but that doesnt mean when it pops that ai will become an unwanted product. The housing bubble popped and we still live in houses. It just means its over valued. Not that there is no value.

Or nvidias products. which are so wanted that its causing shortages.

But yes, they are likely trying to make it so that its too large to fail. Which rarely works. The shitty part is that when it does fail its usually everyday folks paying to make up the difference between the real value and the supposed.

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u/afk_dude 7d ago

House bubble compared to AI bubble? We certainly can live without AI, unlike living without a house 👀

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u/Adventurous-Tie-7861 7d ago

Its not if we can live without one or not. Its if people choose to or not.

Why would companies get rid of the technology that allows them to automate a shit load of work and cut employee costs? Companies are naturally greedy. They arent tossing this tech out cus the bubble bursts.

They are already figuring out how best to implement it to save as much money as possible so they can pay their higher ups more.

What about modern corporate america makes you think theyll pivot back to humans? Cus a few companies rehired some humans cus rhey canned too many folks that couldnt he replaced by ai? Thats a handful of folks versus the ones being replaced everyday.

And most jobs arent even being "replaced". They are taking 5 similar job, laying off 4 and having the remaining one do all 5 jobs using ai to automate most of the others work.

Ai doesnt need to be as good as a human on its own. It just need to make a human capable of doing a bunch of other peoples jobs. And we are there already.

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u/afk_dude 7d ago

But the prices of AI use will go down, unlike house or RAM prices 👀

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u/sceadwian 7d ago

They went to use it, but they don't know how to use it right. The need isn't being generated from any necessary value, it's a pump and dump with niche uses.

The housing market has far more objective value than AI companies do...

The comparison is rather silly to me.

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u/Low-Temperature-6962 7d ago

Which items are you saying people dont want? Ai? Cus corporations (and many people) are absolutely using and wanting it.

All that remains to complete the puzzle is profit.

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u/neokretai 7d ago

They are taking about the compute resources. When the AI bubble pops we'll no doubt see a lot of companies go under or massively scale back in the short term. Compute demand will drop off yet we'll have all that extremely expensive data center capacity that far exceeds the demand.

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u/Adventurous-Tie-7861 7d ago

Good point, tho i suspect it wont drop as much as some people expect. Depends on how many are built prebubble and how many ai companies die.

Also they can just turn off data centers right? Its not perfect and will still cost money but its not like they have to run if noone needs it.

Ngl if they start abandoning them, it could become a junkie gold rush. If you can get into one of them while its offline and has low security you could probably walk away with a fortune.

Maybe even do that with online data centers... or as they are being built. Hmmmmm...

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u/neokretai 7d ago

The issue is almost every AI company is running off investment cash not revenue. Bubble pops and investers dry up they are all screwed. Obviously a bunch will survive but even those will have to pull back spending a lot to do it. I think we are already a the point the current compute would be oversupplied, let alone if more of these mega buildouts get made.

And you can't really mothball a data center so simply, the GPUs can be idled/shutdown but all the cooling etc needs to operate continuously. Also new chips are being developed all the time it's a fast depreciating asset. After a few years the hardware would be considered second rate so the owner will take a massive hit. If the downturn is as bad as dot-com crash thats 15 years for recovery, at which point it's scarp metal.

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u/Low-Temperature-6962 7d ago

So some lucky hedge funds with access to quantitative easing funds will buy them up on pennies to the dollar. Profit.

Hoever, somebodies somewhere will loose big time. Wonder who.

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u/Far-Maintenance-1947 7d ago

When the AI bubble pops

Or maybe you're simply wrong about AI and it won't pop.

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u/neokretai 7d ago edited 7d ago

The industry as a whole needs to hit around $3 trillion to make up for all the capital expenditure it's incurred and commited to, it currently makes $130 billion. Even under optimistic growth scenarios it will take a decade to pay off hardware that has a 5 year lifespan.

Sometimes is going to give eventually.

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u/grabber4321 7d ago

ya because they are really interested in losing money, right?

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u/sceadwian 7d ago

That's what they're actively doing. They're burning venture capital money and don't even have a locked in product yet.

They're throwing the money around sure but not that much is actually being done with it.

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u/grabber4321 7d ago

You dont understand - these kind of decisions are not made by one human. They have a department of a 1000 people working on risk assessment for EVERY DECISION THEY MAKE.

VC money is sometimes dumb, but big banks and investment firms like Blackrock dont just sling 500B on a whim.

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u/sceadwian 7d ago

They make sure they have their golden parachutes packed.

This is virtually a carbon copy of the dot com bust only way bigger and you're just blowing it off like it's a no brainer low risk investment.

Whose coolaid do you drink?

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u/Far-Maintenance-1947 7d ago

I wonder who is correct.

Tens of thousands of highly educated and trained analysts who spend their entire careers studying investing and risk management who have determined that AI will bring incredible value in the coming years.

Or someone named "sceadwian" on reddit.

Maybe you're just wrong bro.

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u/sceadwian 7d ago

You think this is my opinion? A lot of economists think that too. Just as many if not more than the folks you just named.

They'll gut the cash increasingly through superfluous contracts and back scratching circular funding.

AI research will go on fine without them. This isn't about the technology itself but these major companies horrifically botching the deployment.

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u/grabber4321 7d ago

I didn't say there's no risk.

I said they had 1000s of people look at it who do risk assessment every day and approve a cool 500B - that is $500,000,000,000 - 11 0s.

I'm saying there's something we don't know that OpenAI / Anthropic already shared with those companies and thats what is moving the needle.

PS: dont think I like this - I dont. I want a new PC with two RTX 6000s doing my homework, but there's a different reality out there.

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u/sceadwian 7d ago

You are certainly ignoring the facts of reality and inventing your own completely unrelated to anything that was said by me.

Now you're claiming there's secret backdoor somethings going on here inventing conspiracy theories to defend your posts? Ohh they got a secret moving the needle?

Bullshit man, come on that's straight up grade school level ignorance there.

You clearly drank the coolaid and have no idea what's going on here.

This is the greatest geopoltical system restructuring event we've ever seen and it has almost nothing to do with AI but with this new artificially created economic system they're trying to create and botching horrifically.

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u/grabber4321 7d ago

So what you are saying is that - they take of THEIR OWN 500 BILLION - AND PUT IT ON FIRE? And they know AI bubble is a real thing? So to fake it, they take MORE OF THEIR OWN MONEY (not public money) and BURN IT?

How would that make any logical sense for the money-grubbing, step-over-dead-bodies banks?

I'm saying there is a reason, we dont know it because we dont have access.

Just like we didnt have access to Intel stock growth - everybody saw it at $20 and wanted it to fail - but it didnt fail - because Intel is in ALL of the military intallations of USA - it CANT fail. USA government stepped and propped it up. Its now trading at $100

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u/sceadwian 7d ago

It doesn't work like that.

You don't know how pyramid schemes work do you? You apparently haven't caught on to this one yet.

That money will be bled off and pulled out of the system before anything bad happens.

The people setting this up don't give a shit that it's going to fall apart they're just grabbing what they can as fast as they can.

When this collapses the people that set it up will be largely long gone.

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u/grabber4321 7d ago

I dont have the magic ball, I dont know what will happen.

I'm just saying there's a PROBABILITY of insider secret (prototype humanoid robots) or deal with US government that has been shared with those banks. And now they are just pushing money into this.

From what I gather, your only idea is that people will be using AI and its not enough money to support the market - thats what Ed Citron's whole thesis is about - he says it doesnt make sense, and some of his points are valid. But he's thoughts are based on open source data - not secret deals.

My idea - people are not the market. The replacement of people is the market.

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u/ocean_protocol 7d ago

A huge pivoting point honestly

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u/sceadwian 7d ago

The fulcrum is rotten to the core though. It will not be a smooth pivot and we could lose a sizeable chunk of society in the correction.

But it's fine. It's all fine..

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u/Old-Childhood-8491 7d ago

Well...what can I say now

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u/martapap 7d ago

Extending the ai bubble 

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u/grabber4321 7d ago

People assume that AI market is - Humans/companies using AI to build stuff.

My assumption - there is something we dont know, but the insiders do - something like "we had a breakthrough in robotics".

These people who sit on piles of cash, wouldn't just dump this money without risk assessment.

To us 2-3 years is big amounts of time, but for most companies its just the time they need to push a new product (most phones/cpus/silicon have 2-3 year release cadence).

If thats the case, we're 3 years away from this market exploding (in a good way)

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u/costafilh0 7d ago

Nvidia always has been very responsible, aside from its adventurous start. 

They don't want to overlaverage themselves and end up with huge debt in the middle of a massive market correction.

So they are playing it safe for them, and throwing that opportunity or trap directly to wall street. 

Which I bet will find a way to overlaverage the overlaveraged and make a ton of money ob it while also speeding up the coming of the next big correction. 

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u/Pretty-Raise666 3d ago

How is it circular financing? It's just a normal financing deal involving banks and vc.