Nvidia and xAI Sign On to $30 Billion AI Infrastructure Fund
Elon Musk’s xAI and chipmaker Nvidia have joined a $30 billion artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure project.
The AI Infrastructure Fund, backed by BlackRock, Microsoft and Abu Dhabi AI investment group MGX, announced the two-high profile sign-ups Wednesday (March 19), noting that their ultimate goal was to raise up to $100 billion for artificial intelligence (AI) development.
“The global buildout of AI infrastructure will benefit every company and country that wants to achieve economic growth and unlock solutions to the world’s greatest challenges,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said in the announcement.
“AI factories built on Nvidia full-stack AI infrastructure will convert data into intelligence that will accelerate every industry and help society achieve unimaginable breakthroughs,” he added.
Microsoft and Blackrock launched the fund last year, aiming to raise money to construct data centers and find sources of power for those facilities.
The announcement comes one day after Huang told attendees at the Nvidia developer conference that massive computing power is required to enable the current trajectory of AI as it moves toward agents and reasoning models.
“AI is going through an inflection point,” the CEO said at the event, nicknamed “AI Woodstock,” adding that the shift to agentic and reasoning means “the amount of computation necessary to train those models, and to inference those models, has grown tremendously.”
Traditional large language models need much less computing power than AI agents and reasoning models, but they also answer immediately. Reasoning models need much more power because they go back and forth reasoning among themselves before responding, which in many cases would take longer.
“In order for us to keep the model responsive, so that we don’t lose our patience waiting for it to think, we now have to compute 10 times faster,” Huang said. “The amount of computation we have to do is 100 times more, easily.”
As PYMNTS noted, Huang was making the case that the AI industry will still require a lot of Nvidia GPUs following a flurry of news in January surrounding the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. That company said it had trained its high-performing foundation AI model using only 2,000 slower Nvidia H800 chips instead of typically tens of thousands or more for companies like OpenAI.
The BlackRock/Microsoft fund isn’t the only multi-billion dollar effort to finance AI infrastructure projects. In January, SoftBank and OpenAI unveiled their “Stargate” project to develop AI infrastructure, with plans to spend up to $100 billion.
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