Wall Street Wants to Turn Nvidia Chips Into a New Asset Class. Here's Why That's Complicated.
Six of the world's biggest financial firms are joining Nvidia to bundle $500 billion in chip financing. The pitch is that GPUs are now investable assets like buildings or bonds. The catch: Nvidia's own CEO said something very different about chip lifespans just last year.
Key points
- Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR are working with Nvidia on a $500 billion financing package to treat AI chips as investable assets.
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang now says the A100 chip from 2020 has an economic life approaching ten years, contrasting sharply with comments he made last year dismissing older chips as nearly worthless.
- The deal rests on memorandums of understanding, which are statements of intent rather than binding contracts, and a $100 billion Nvidia MOU with OpenAI announced in 2024 did not go ahead.
- Short seller Michael Burry puts useful chip lifespan at two to three years; IBM's CEO says five; Huang now claims ten.
- A cloud provider nearly doubled its rental price for Nvidia Blackwell B200 chips during a contract renewal, according to data cited by The Verge AI.
Six of the most powerful names in global finance announced this month that they are teaming up with Nvidia on a $500 billion plan to make AI chips something lenders can treat like real estate or bonds. The group: Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR.
"This is really the first time that technology chips have become an investable asset class," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC. He called his chips "revenue-generating assets" that are "productive, long-lived and fungible," meaning they can be swapped between users and purposes.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink compared the moment to the birth of mortgage-backed securities, the bundled home loans that became central to 1970s financial engineering and, later, the centrepiece of the 2008 financial crisis.
Why are chips suddenly being treated like property?
Think of it as a GPU-backed loan. A GPU, or graphics processing unit, is the specialised chip that does the heavy number-crunching AI needs. Firms buy huge quantities of them, and now banks want to lend money against them the way a mortgage lender lends against a house.
The value of that loan depends heavily on how long the chip stays useful. That is where Huang's current pitch runs into his own past statements.
Last year, Huang told attendees at an Nvidia conference that when the company's newest chips started shipping in volume, "you couldn't give Hoppers away," referring to the previous generation. "There are circumstances where Hopper is fine. Not many."
Now, to support the financing pitch, Huang points to the A100 chip Nvidia launched in 2020 and says it "remains in active commercial use" with customers committing to multi-year contracts. He claims the economic life of that chip is approaching a decade.
Does the maths actually add up?
That claim matters enormously to lenders, because the longer a chip holds its value, the more money they can lend against it and the longer the loan can run.
Nobody agrees on that lifespan. Burry argues chips depreciate over two to three years. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says five. Huang now says ten.
For reference, Broadcom signed a $35 billion deal with Apollo and Blackstone earlier, using roughly a million chips as loan collateral, and that deal came with a guarantee from Broadcom itself backing the loans. No equivalent guarantee from Nvidia has been announced here. AI2Day first covered the mechanics of GPU-backed financing on 19 August 2026, and the gap between Broadcom's structure and Nvidia's proposal was apparent even then.
Should ordinary people care about this?
If you rent cloud computing for a business, yes. Chip rental prices have already been rising, and one market analyst, Brendan Burke, says the cause is a shortage of chips used for inference, the process where an AI model actually answers your questions after it has been trained. A cloud provider nearly doubled its per-chip rental rate at contract renewal.
More broadly, this isn't a done deal. The announcement covers memorandums of understanding, formal letters of intent rather than signed contracts. A $100 billion Nvidia MOU with OpenAI announced in 2024 never produced a deal.
Watch for two things: whether any of these firms publish binding loan terms and what depreciation schedule they accept, and whether chip rental prices keep climbing or level off as new data centres come online. The real tell will be which firm, if any, is willing to put its name behind the ten-year depreciation claim without a Nvidia guarantee backing it up. That's what separates a financing revolution from a very large press release.
