Welcome back to Closing Bell Overtime. We have this big breaking news this afternoon about what's been happening when it comes to the AI infrastructure build. This is news that was first out a little earlier today, but we can confirm that news at this point. Nvidia working with some of the biggest names on Wall Street to secure financing for its customers. Joining right now with us to talk about all of this is Jensen Huang. He of course is Nvidia's founder and CEO. David Solomon is the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Larry Fink is BlackRock CEO. John Gray is Blackstone's president. Vladimir Lasac is global head of digital infrastructure at KKR. Jim Zelter is Apollo's president and Bruce Flatt is Brookfield CEO. And gentlemen, welcome to all of you today. It's kind of amazing to get this group around the table and Larry to have you joining us remotely, too. But we have to start with this news, Jensen. This is a big deal and it's a big number. Half a trillion dollars, more than that in terms of financing. We know this is an expensive build, but tell us a little bit about how this came together and what exactly it is.
Well, first of all, I want to thank all of my partners for joining me here today. I think this is first time this has ever happened before and I can't imagine a more important time to do it. We're announcing six partnerships today. These partnerships are going to pull together independent long-term capital to fund and support AI infrastructure buildout. This is an extraordinary time as you know because this is the first time in some 60 years that the computing industry is going through a fundamental platform shift from the way that software was done before to the way that it's going to be done in the future called artificial intelligence. Fundamentally what's different about this industry and this way of doing computing is that the computer is now part of the infrastructure like electricity, like the internet, and so you have to think about it like its infrastructure and build it out accordingly. Every company will be powered by it. Every country will build it. And so we're talking about an extraordinarily significant infrastructure build.
With a very hefty price tag.
It's a hefty price tag. Each gigawatt is something like 50 to 60 billion. And so there's energy involved. There's land, power, and shell involved. And of course there's the computing part of it. This is of course also a milestone for our company. We used to build chips that we sell and these are technology components that people buy and use. But now Nvidia's AI factory platform is really an investable asset, an infrastructure asset. And the reason for that is because it's productive, it's revenue generating. It is fungible. It's used by just about every cloud service provider. It runs every AI model. It runs algorithms of all different types. And so it has really broad deep reach and offtakers. This is a really great opportunity for us to build out the infrastructure, take advantage of an asset that is investable, long life, and productive. And with the partnerships that we have here, we can support a really broad ecosystem buildout.
John, I'll say it's very unusual to have all of you in one place. Most of you compete on one level or another. A lot of times you work together on things, too. But how did this come together? How did they all come to you? And David, I'll start with you on this.
Well, I mean, Jensen approached us and, you know, we've got a deep belief and a lot of confidence in Nvidia and what they're doing. We have a deep belief in the opportunity set that's ahead. We like all the partners at the table have been spending a lot of time raising capital and thinking about the capital that's necessary and how we create the best access to that capital for people that need it to move things forward. I think one of the things Goldman Sachs brings to the table is we have an extraordinary distribution network. So we obviously bring capital but we also bring a very, very unique distribution network. But Jensen approached us with the idea and we said, you know, we'd love to talk to you about it. We have a deep belief in the direction of travel and the opportunity set over the course of the next 3, 5, 7, 10 years. As Jensen highlighted, it's a big infrastructure build and the capital markets are signaling that there's lots of capital available to support it. And we're trying to find all the different ways that we as an organization in partnership with other great firms that are doing similar things can participate in getting the capital to the right places to extend this or accelerate this infrastructure building.
You know, I described it before as if I buy a GM car, I might get financing from GM. This is you kind of bringing other people from the outside to say these will be the partners that do this financing.
And by the way, it's not Nvidia's money that's coming up on this.
That's right. This is all third-party independent long-term capital that all of my partners are going to help us pull together. This is really quite extraordinary. This is a phase shift in the way that people think about computing. It used to be technology, now it's infrastructure. And I always add, this is really what David just explained. This is calling all precincts. This is American exceptionalism and what Nvidia has created over the last 33 years coming together right now. But this is calling all precincts because really now compute is an asset class. And when we think about the last hundred years, the last century of water and power and utilities,
You know, in 2026 and beyond the next decade, you will lead this. It's a global imperative, but it's a US imperative. And as I said before, this is really all precincts coming together, not just one market of equity or debt or banks, but it needs any and all.
American exceptionalism meaning that you are going to be building with an American company, Nvidia and others. But this is financing that could go around the globe.
No, no doubt. But the depth and breadth of the US global markets in aggregate is the envy of the world. Nvidia is one of the envies of the world, what they've created. And what you're seeing here, this consortium of partners, and yes we do compete, but we finance a tremendous amount together as well. And at the end of the day, this will benefit the US economy as a competitive tool for the advancement for the next decade.
Larry, let me get you in because you're not here around the table today, but I'd like to get your perspective on this. Is this new money that's going to be spent? Have you already raised this money? Is this money that you were going to be deploying into AI anyway and it's just kind of funneling it towards certain partners?
Well, first of all, hi everyone. Jensen, thank you. Thank you for the trust that you've given BlackRock. We have some capital now, but we're going to be raising quite a bit more capital. As Jensen said, each gigawatt costs 50 to 60 billion dollars to build out and we're talking about in the United States alone, we're going to need over 70 gigawatts of power to fuel this. And then you add up everything else around the world, it's going to be an enormous financial opportunity. As Jim is talking about American exceptionalism, it has to flow through the American capital markets because this is the biggest source of capital. But the other angle that I think is so important that we must also understand, there is quite a bit of negativity around AI and data centers right now. But let's be clear, this is going to be creating a huge amount of jobs. You think about even 100 megawatts of a data center requires as much as 3 million hours of workers. And so this should be looked upon as a great growth opportunity for the United States, furthering growth elsewhere in the world.
And most importantly, we need to raise this money as fast as possible and put this to work. Because I think it's really imperative that the United States is the leader in AI in the world and I think we need to be the leader in the disbursement of this technology around the world. And I think this is why this is so critical and I applaud what Nvidia has done bringing all these firms together and saying we have a common goal. We need to raise $500 billion, obviously that's an unprecedented amount of money, but we're going to have to raise trillions of dollars over the coming years. And I do believe this is going to be representing a fantastic investment. In fact, I think it's going to be such a large investment over time, you're going to see more and more allocation into this asset class. Jim talked about compute as an asset class, but importantly, I look at the financing of data centers. This is the very beginning like what it was when I started in the mortgage-backed securities market in the 1970s. And I look upon this as a next future for financial engineering.
All right, let me ask a question. Larry, David, you guys might be able to weigh in on this a little bit, too. And John, I think you too, but just the idea of how much money you need to raise with this. Is there enough money within the public and private markets? Do you need government money that would do, I mean, if you think of national highway system when you had a buildout like this, it had to be government money that was spending some of this. Is there enough money in our capital markets to handle this? And is it profitable for the investors? Like who wants to take it? John, why don't you jump in?
Sure. I would say first off, it's great to be here. What Jensen has built is incredible. What I would say is our markets are large and it's one of the great strengths when we talk about America, when you look at our ability to finance $700 billion a year in automotive or a couple trillion dollars a year in housing, I think we're going to see a similar dynamic. And what is supporting it is supply and demand. So today at our companies, we've seen a sevenfold increase in demand for LLMs in the last 6 months. And yet the amount of compute is not keeping up. The data centers, the power, the chips. And so what you're going to see here is people are going to begin to recognize that this is a financable asset class. So when you think about your home, you know, when you go to buy a house, the bank underwrites you, but they also look at the value of your home. When an airline goes to buy a plane, they look at the credit of that company, but also the plane. I think historically here the limitation has been investors have said, 'Oh, I only want so much exposure to this hyperscaler or maybe to this foundational model company.' I think when people recognize how powerful and valuable this compute is, no matter who's using it, and in Jensen's case, they've got very fungible, flexible capabilities with their GPUs and the CUDA software. So what I think is markets are going to recognize the opportunity. If the scale gets very, very big, which it is, pricing could widen out, but I think in the fullness of time the recognition of the supply-demand imbalance and the value of the compute is going to draw capital in.
Can I just add one thing?
Yeah, we'll go, we'll jump here and here. Okay, let's talk about Brookfield in particular, what you guys are doing.
Look, I just on Brookfield in particular, we've been building out backbone infrastructure since the company started. And originally it started with enormous amounts of power, solar, wind, gas. We moved to data centers, and with Jensen we've now been moving to compute, both financing but also building this compute. And we cannot build enough power. We cannot build enough compute for the demand that John's talking about. So this is not about is there too much financing being made. It's that we can't build it fast enough.
But the question always becomes will the demand stay at those levels. And Jensen, you see this, you see further up than probably anybody on what's happening here. Is there a point where we can't keep up at the moment but the demand changes?
Look, I think what's, and Jensen will have a really good opinion on this one, but what we're seeing in our industrial businesses is we are just scratching the surface in using AI and the productivity advances that it's giving us. And we don't even know how to use it yet, but the productivity advances are giving us are incredible. And this is why this backbone is laying the foundation in the world for the next evolution of business and wealth creation, is because it's so evolutionary or revolutionary that it's going to change everything we do in the world. And that's why it's so important. And that's why with Jensen pulling capital together, I was going to start to go back to what John was talking about, is we're at a point where the situation is that there hasn't been the format for investors to invest into this. And David in particular, we need to create the structures, and Jensen's leading this to create structures, because there's hundreds of trillions of dollars of money in the world. The structures look like what they have, low financing. They basically are you get Nvidia's stamp of approval, like these are customers that we're working with that we are giving our limited supplies to.
And the system architectures are going to be specified in such a way that when we know that they deploy it, we can continuously improve it. We can bring all kinds of fungible and flexible AI models to it, and if anything were to happen, somebody else could take it over and operate it. And so that architecture...
That's important too, that this will be used by somebody even if the players mentioned run out of cash at some point.
There will always be a customer for that computing platform. And the reason for that is because as you know Nvidia's architecture is fairly universally adopted.
Every week, Jensen and us announced a deal in Korea. He's putting up a billion dollars. We're putting up $9 billion. Neighbor is going to use the compute, and it's a system you can now systematize. What we need to do is take that and do it all across the world and all across companies, to be able to systematize, to bring more compute capacity to the market.
Well, Jensen, that brings, and I want to get to BlackRock in just a moment, but that brings up this important question. There have been all these big numbers that have been thrown around, what you're doing with SK. There was a Wall Street Journal story recently that suggests, Ed, you'd be backstopping financing for $250 billion for an OpenAI plant in Ohio potentially. That's a lot of money. It's a lot of things to carry on your balance sheet. This is not that, because this is not money that Nvidia is backstopping in any way, shape, or form. But
Those two things are not that either. In the case of SK, as you know, we're one of the largest users of memories in the world. We're the largest computer company in the world. And so we use a lot of memory and our partnership with SK is multi-year and most of that's related to memory consumption and memory partnership. And so that's the SK. With respect to OpenAI, I won't comment about rumors. However, today's partnerships is really about expanding it beyond a larger, broader set of ecosystem partners.
But you have $200 billion in free cash flow. You've got a huge balance sheet. Is it your prerogative to say, 'Look, we are not going to pledge our balance sheet against all of these things because you can.' Do you have other things you're doing it and that's why you bring in outside financing partners?
No, it's really because there's a phase shift in how we think about computing now, and all my partners here have all talked about it really eloquently. This is really the first time that technology chips have become an investable asset class. This is a very big concept. It's a big concept because these systems are not like our PCs or like our phones. These are revenue generating assets now. They're productive. They're long-lived. They're fungible. They're flexible. You can use it for all kinds of different things. And so you have the opportunity to support a very large ecosystem of offtakers, and Nvidia developers and AI clouds and AI partners and enterprises all around the world, and it's incredibly revenue generating.
Does that change how you see the investor that brings into this or how you look at it on a...
The capital markets have always, I mean, this is it, in a simple form, and you did it yourself when you opened and you talked about GM financing a car. The capital markets have been asset-backed financing markets for a long, long time. You asked the question about capital availability. What we're doing is we're trying to find different ways to raise or to participate in raising the enormous amount of capital that's necessary to fund this infrastructure buildout. And you're starting to see, in a sense, asset-based financing against this infrastructure build. And that's not surprising because these are real assets. They have real value. You can put a tangible value on it. And there's a lot of capital out there. I mean, one of the things I always step back and think about, there's $9 trillion when you think about the US capital markets. There's $9 trillion in US money market funds. There's a hundred trillion dollars in US equities. There's a lot of capital out there. It's our job as stewards of the capital markets, as also asset management firms that steward capital for other investors, to find the best way to deploy this. And will it be a straight line? No. Will there be points, to John's point, where spreads widen out and it feels like things are going too fast? Yes. Will the returns from all of these things be ample? Of course not. There'll be winners and losers, but that's what the capital markets do. And the capital markets are pretty effective and pretty efficient at getting those things right.
Vladimir, let's talk a little bit about what you've been doing as the global head of digital infrastructure at KKR. You've been doing this for a long time. What's changed, what's different, and what's so important about these announcements, these memorandums of understanding, I guess, that you would put into that? How does that change the equation for what you've been doing for a long time?
Well, thank you for having me. And this is an incredible panel of experts, and Jensen, thank you for the partnership. We're obviously building on the partnership we've established with Helix Digital Infrastructure, which is really an innovative way of building the entire stack of the value chain, from power, from molecule we call it, to the token, which is I think what we're all describing here. I think what has changed is the speed. If you think about the buildout of the internet over 15 years, a couple gigawatts of power was effectively consumed in a centralized fashion. The cloud is the next evolution, 10, 15 years, maybe 3x that. Today we're adding that much capacity on a quarterly basis, which is just incredible to think about. It takes a whole village to finance this. So we think about it as capital and capability, and that's something we know really well at KKR. We've been doing this for quite some time. Big investors in data centers and power, and I think we view this as really a generational investment opportunity. I want to touch on one thing, which is I think what John mentioned, the intrinsic value of the compute layer. So I think we're big believers that integration is occurring and the centralization of compute needs to move up and the fungibility of compute. Of course, Nvidia is incredible innovator. Just talked about Vera Rubin earlier and rolling that out, and the efficiency of production of tokens per watt of energy consumed is a step-change function, which means that compute is declining rapidly and adoption is increasing even more rapidly. That's why price per token is down 99% and probably collapse into cents, which means you have to have a very efficient way to finance it, which is I think the parties around here, and then build infrastructure at scale. And that means time to market and innovate. What's really interesting is that A100s, right? So you would think about it that six years into it, maybe six or seven years into it, there is still a market for it. You still actually are revenue generating, to Jensen's point. The utilization of those chips is very high. The price per chip is very high. And so you actually are getting revenue on that. And in that way, you can think about it as a revenue stream and you can securitize it or effectively divide that risk and sell it to investors who want to participate anywhere in that stack. And that really gets us excited about this moving upstream but also owning the big part of the downstream, as Jensen calls it, is the land, power, and shell.
Hey Jim, just a couple of weeks ago, you and Blackstone, or a couple of months ago I should say, you and Blackstone had your own deal that you put together that was pretty similar to financing like this. I think it was $35 billion for Broadcom. How is this different and how do you kind of view these things?
I think it's another example of what Jensen was describing a few minutes ago, this whole ecosystem with compute and GPUs being a financial asset you could actually fund and finance. I think those are coming into the mainstream. And I think as we've all around the table have been doing this for three and four decades, the constant evolution of capitalism, and David's right, there will be excesses, there will be pullbacks, but what I think is different right now in '26 is in the past we've thought about these things being financed either through the equity market or maybe the narrow market of private credit. As I said earlier, this is a calling all precincts, any and all. But what we've seen is in the equity market people don't mind having concentrated bets. By the fact that we're bringing more of an ecosystem and a variety of it, it allows the concentration concerns about one company or one counterparty. What John described is the value not only in the company but actually in the facility that's also going to bring in more dollars around the globe. So we're at a point in time right now, not only is the global industrial renaissance at a peak, but also we have a situation where we have more global folks who need long-term, long-duration retirement solutions. So whether that's done institutionally or globally or however it is, that's going to be the key to bringing this all together.
David, let me ask you one question on this though. We did have Steve Eisman of The Big Short fame who was on Squawk Box just about a week and a half ago. He came in and said, 'Look, the AI trade is the entire market at this point.' He said, 'That could be a great thing or it could be a bad thing.' But he said wherever you look there are growth and it's not just the chip stocks, it's not just the hyperscalers, it is not just the infrastructure companies that are doing all of this. He says it's the banks because they're financing so much of this too. Is he right? He said look, it could be a really wonderful thing or it could be a little concerning because of just the concentration at this point. Do you agree with him on that or do you see other places in the economy right now that are driving?
