NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is trying to turn its AI chips into an entirely new asset class. The company announced partnerships with six major financial firms, Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR, to launch “compute financing platforms” aimed at raising more than $500 billion in outside capital for AI infrastructure. CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia could backstop up to $125 billion, or 25%, of the potential deals.
Blackstone Inc. (NYSE:BX) President Jon Gray said on CNBC that AI compute will be seen as a “financeable asset class,” much like how mortgage lenders assess homes.
Why This Matters
Nvidia is trying to make Wall Street treat AI chips as bankable infrastructure right as skepticism about AI spending is rising.
That leaves a real tension: is this smart financial engineering that unlocks the AI buildout, or a sign the industry needs increasingly creative ways to keep the spending machine running?
The Bull and Bear Case: Nvidia
CEO Huang argues that because NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA)’s hardware is broadly used and transferable across customers, lenders can reliably treat compute as a long-lived and revenue-generating asset rather than rapidly depreciating equipment. Nvidia widens the pool of buyers who can afford its chips without footing most of the capital bill itself by helping customers finance purchases off their own balance sheets. The move follows Nvidia’s existing SK Hynix memory partnership and a reported deal to guarantee financing for a 10-gigawatt Ohio data center leased to OpenAI. It is part of a broader pattern of Nvidia actively engineering both supply and demand at once.
However, commentators, including an FT column, have flagged “circular financing” concerns, the risk that Nvidia is effectively financing its own demand, which could obscure how healthy the underlying AI economics really are. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) shares actually fell after the deal was first reported, erasing more than $70 billion in market value, suggesting some investors read it skeptically rather than as good news outright. The announcement also comes weeks after a July market swoon in which investors openly questioned whether trillions in AI capital spending will ever pay off, and after Moody’s warned that heavy capex is squeezing free cash flow and pushing tech giants toward more debt.
The Bull and Bear Case: Blackstone
Blackstone Inc. (NYSE:BX) gets a front-row seat to structuring what its president calls a new financeable asset class at a moment when AI compute demand across Blackstone’s portfolio companies has already surged sevenfold this year. The firm has prior experience financing AI infrastructure for companies like Anthropic. This gives it a head start in building similar Nvidia-backed products. Blackstone joined a $500 billion project as one of only six partners. The company plans to invest a huge amount of money into the effort. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink compared this moment to the creation of mortgage-backed investments back in the 1970s.
Nonetheless, deploying at this scale means Blackstone Inc. (NYSE:BX) is taking on concentrated exposure to a single, fast-moving technology whose long-term value curve is still unproven, a real risk if AI hardware doesn’t hold its value as newer chip generations arrive. If AI capital spending slows or hyperscaler results disappoint, credit structured around compute assets could face the kind of stress that hit mortgage-backed securities when housing turned, which is a troubling reminder of Fink’s own comparison.
Insider Monkey’s Hedge Fund Data
NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) was held by 275 hedge funds as of Q1 2026. Blackstone Inc. (NYSE:BX) was held by 84, unchanged from the prior quarter. Among Blackstone’s fellow financing partners, KKR had 82 hedge fund holders, Apollo had 81, and Goldman Sachs had 83. Blackstone is essentially tied with Goldman Sachs and modestly ahead of KKR and Apollo. Nvidia remains far more broadly held than any of its new financing partners.
Conclusion
This deal shows just how central Nvidia has become to Wall Street’s AI playbook, but treating chips like mortgages only works if the basic asset holds its value the way housing was assumed to.
Overall, hedge funds favor NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) over Blackstone Inc. (NYSE:BX).
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
