Alphabet’s stock slips as Nvidia unveils $500B financing deal that threatens Google’s custom chip business

Nvidia just figured out how to make its GPUs as financeable as office buildings. The company signed memorandums of understanding with six heavyweight financial institutions to mobilize over $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure, a move that sent Alphabet’s stock sliding roughly 2%. The partnerships, announced on August 10, include Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR. The GPU becomes an asset class Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described the initiative as creating a new class of “AI factories,” productive infrastructure that institutional investors can finance the same way they’d back a data center campus or a toll road. The idea is straightforward: if GPUs generate predictable revenue streams for their operators, they can be underwritten like any other cash-flowing asset. Nvidia has also signaled willingness to put skin in the game, potentially backstopping up to 25% of certain financing arrangements under the framework. Why Alphabet feels the pressure Google’s parent company has spent years developing its Tensor Processing Units, custom AI chips designed to give its cloud platform and internal AI projects a competitive edge. The roughly ...