CEO Jensen Huang believes the free AI models will drive underlying Nvidia GPU chip sales|Taiwan Presidential Office|CC BY 2.0
Chipmaker Nvidia has signed MoUs with major financial firms—Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR—to raise over $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an X post that the company can backstop up to $125 billion, or 25%, of potential deals.
The fundraising move comes as Big Tech anticipated AI expenditure to surpass $730 billion this year.
Meanwhile, Nvidia released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a lightweight, free, open-source AI model that can run on a single PC graphics processing unit.
The launch follows Huang’s recent letter advocating open-weight AI models over closed-weight alternatives and urging the US government to support them.
He believes the free AI models will drive underlying Nvidia GPU chip sales.