Nvidia's $500B Financing Bet & The Rise of Robotics

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**Ann Berry** (0:31)
Bumble, the dating app, up ends its hallmark feature in a bid to revive growth, but will it pay off? It's Tuesday, meaning Money Mover Day, and I'm digging into robotics with one researcher focused on how AI is taking over the physical world. And Nvidia, the chip giant wants AI compute treated as a, quote, investible asset class. We break down a $500 billion bet that it can be. For Tuesday, August 11th, it's Brew Markets Daily, and I'm Ann Berry.
More market details to come, but first, Nvidia. Announcing over $500 billion in financing from a who's who of Wall Street asset managers. That's to fund building out artificial intelligence infrastructure. The chip OG now looks a little bit like a neo bank that has Nvidia signs memorandums of understanding with Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish financing platforms for Nvidia's customers. With that $500 billion in the war chest to fund hyperscalers, frontier AI labs and enterprises as they build out data centers and acquire Nvidia hardware. That's the punchline. On the heft of the six money titans, with a combined market cap of closing into a trillion dollars, marks a critical moment best articulated by Jensen Huang when the Nvidia CEO joined CNBC last night, saying, quote, this is really the first time that technology chips have become an investible asset class. In the interview and on PosterX, on the company website, Huang described Nvidia's widely adopted hardware as transferable across customers with an extended life, saying, quote, we have a platform that is fungible by all industries. It really de-risks the investment and makes this infrastructure much more investible.
Enabling AI compute to be seen, in the words of Blackstone president Jonathan Gray, quote, as a financable asset class in the same way that mortgage lenders look at homes. And BlackRock's Larry Fink also embraced the real estate analogy, likening the moment to the creation of mortgage-backed securities in the 1970s.
But despite the heavyweight backing, there are skeptics when it comes to the real comparability of Nvidia hardware with bricks and mortar. While maybe not depreciating as quickly as before, GPUs are still typically tagged with some obsolescence risk, raising the question as to whether AI chips can retain their value as newer generations emerge.
Well, the half a trillion dollar deal has also reignited recurring fears of circular financing, raising the ongoing question again as to whether Nvidia is indirectly helping finance demand for its own hardware by combining its own balance sheet investments in the equity of firms like OpenAI. Remember those headlines they've been dominating for the past 18 months, with now brokering an additional massive new debt layer. Well, as the market absorbed the announcement, Nvidia stock flashed throughout the day, sometimes up. As for those big six financing partners, stocks ticking up between a half a point and four and a half percent on the news. We're going to keep on watching. Well, coming up, a quick spin through some eye-catching headlines, plus my conversation with today's money mover, VettaFi's Zeno Mercer, taking us under the hood of the robotics boom. But first, this episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab.

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**Ann Berry** (4:40)
Well, before we get to our guest and nerd out on all things robotics, a couple of fun headlines that caught our eye, providing a little relief from the continued earnings deluge. Shares in Bumble ticked up about a percent higher today. That's after the dating app announced a complete 180 Bumble, which built its brand around women making the first move, will now let men initiate conversations too. Founder and CEO Whitney Wolf-Hird says the move marks a quote progressive evolution of the app and reflects how online dating has evolved. An evolution, incidentally, which prompted her return to the company last year to turn it around. While this update to the product comes at a critical time, total paying users decreased over 16 percent in the most recent quarter and the stock is still down nearly 60 percent from a year ago.