Nvidia is courting pension funds and other safety-seeking investors for its AI infrastructure drive, announcing partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to build financing platforms aimed at mobilising more than $500 billion.
The cash would come largely from third-party investors rather than Nvidia’s own balance sheet, the company said.
Nvidia pension fund AI pitch: how Jensen Huang framed it
Chief executive Jensen Huang described the approach as treating AI compute like ‘productive infrastructure’, a framing designed to make data-centre hardware feel as bankable as roads or power grids.
To sweeten the pitch, Nvidia is offering residual-value support of up to 25% on some deals.
Morgan Stanley and Bank of America both said Nvidia’s chips were unusually financeable. But Stratechery’s Ben Thompson was less convinced, warning it is ‘a completely new nerve-racking thing to bring safety-seeking assets to bear’ on a pile of GPUs.
Silicon Valley school funds eye AI windfall
The pension-fund play comes as a separate story captures attention in Silicon Valley: parent-run venture funds at Bay Area private schools, steered by investors from firms including Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Battery, have quietly built track records that rival professional portfolios.
Saint Francis High School’s parent-run growth fund turned a $15,000 bet on Snap into roughly $34 million at IPO, Fortune reports.
The school invested at the urging of a parent whose firm, Lightspeed, had been one of Snap’s first outside investors, Fortune adds. Snap went public in March 2017.
With SpaceX having pulled off the biggest IPO in history, and Anthropic and OpenAI widely expected to follow, these school funds could be sitting on the next windfall.
Apple, Google and the rest: other moves in tech
Apple hired Nate Gatten, American Airlines’ head of government affairs since 2017, as its new vice-president of government affairs, starting 31 August. He will report directly to Tim Cook, whose handover of the chief executive role to hardware chief John Ternus is expected in September.
At Google, co-founder Sergey Brin has reportedly spent months personally pushing DeepMind staff to move faster on Gemini, according to Reuters. Google allegedly delayed the next flagship Gemini model by two months after internal testing showed its coding lagged rivals. A restructure last week handed day-to-day authority from DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis to his deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu, who now reports to chief executive Sundar Pichai.
Elsewhere, vibe-coding startup Lovable raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, more than double its December price tag. Grubhub’s $23.8 million FTC settlement is now reaching more than 640,000 diners and drivers via cheques and PayPal payouts, over claims of misleading earnings figures and phantom restaurant listings. And Trump Media is charging up to $100,000 a month for advance access to Truth Social posts, with nearly a dozen trading firms already paying, a move at least one economist has called insider trading.
Nvidia’s financing partners are expected to begin deploying capital as the platforms are formalised, with the Nvidia pension fund AI framework now a central pillar of the company’s long-term infrastructure strategy.
