Wall Street’s largest financial institutions have loaned more than $11bn to a niche group of tech companies based on their possession of the world’s hottest commodity: Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips.
Blackstone, Pimco, Carlyle and BlackRock are among those that have created a lucrative new debt market over the past year by lending to “neocloud” companies, which provide cloud computing to tech groups building AI products.
Neocloud groups such as CoreWeave, Crusoe and Lambda Labs have acquired tens of thousands of Nvidia’s high-performance computer chips, known as GPUs, that are crucial for developing generative AI models. Those Nvidia chips are now also being used as collateral for huge loans.