Goldman Sachs has been approaching a range of potential participants — among them banks, insurers, asset managers, and private credit firms — about joining Nvidia's $500 billion AI infrastructure financing initiative, according to , citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter. The Wall Street bank secured a central role as the sole lender in the deal alongside alternative asset management firms Blackstone and Apollo. Through its asset management arm, Goldman can offer junior capital and private credit financing, and it can also help funnel debt into private credit funds and public debt markets.
Goldman Sachs Chairman and Chief Executive Officer David Solomon said on CNBC that Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang brought the idea to the bank. "Jensen came, approached us with the idea, and we said we'd love to talk to you about it," Solomon told CNBC. The bank's role reflects years of ties with Nvidia.
Goldman Sachs has advised the chipmaker on several transactions and on technology financing deals in which Nvidia was an investor, according to , citing Dealogic. Goldman was Nvidia's sole financial adviser on its $6.9 billion purchase of Mellanox Technologies in 2019 and also counted among the lead underwriters when Nvidia issued bonds in June. Nvidia announced partnerships earlier this week with six major financial institutions — Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR — to establish compute financing platforms aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure buildout over time.
The arrangements were formalized through memorandums of understanding and remain subject to final agreements, the company said. Huang said the partnerships are intended to support customers including frontier AI labs, enterprises, and cloud providers. The structure of the financing differs from earlier AI infrastructure deals.
Earlier deals relied on vendor guarantees — for instance, Broadcom backed roughly $30 billion of senior debt tied to Anthropic's AI chip financing with a residual-value guarantee. Under the Nvidia deal, Huang said the company has the option to backstop up to $125 billion, or 25% of the potential deals. According to , the aim is to establish a functioning asset-backed market around AI compute capacity, where the resulting debt instruments could be bought and sold similarly to conventional securities — potentially reducing borrowing costs and opening the door to a wider range of investors.
Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya wrote in a note that the arrangement "appears to be a pivot away from vendor-financing," adding that "the burden sits with the consortium, not (Nvidia's) balance sheet." At roughly $5.2 trillion in market capitalization, Nvidia currently ranks as the most valuable company trading on U.S. public markets.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
