AI companies need more than clever software. They need data centers full of chips and years of steady financing.
An announcement could come as soon as Monday, according to people the FT says are familiar with the talks.
The firms reportedly in the mix are Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, Global Infrastructure Partners (a BlackRock business), Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, and KKR. None of them replied to the FT's requests for comment, and Nvidia didn't respond right away.
That silence is normal for a deal this size, but it also means the report relies on unidentified sources. Until someone confirms it, the market is working with an unconfirmed story.
Investors didn't treat the news as a reason to buy.
The FT says some investors worry that Nvidia's deals are interlocking, meaning one agreement feeds another, and that can inflate both demand and market values. The company has already signed AI-related agreements across the industry totaling hundreds of billions, so there is a lot to sort through.
Get the free Always Be Buying eBook and learn the simple system for building wealth on any income
If Nvidia helps finance a customer's project and also sells the chips, it is creating demand on both sides of the same deal. That does not automatically mean something is wrong, but it makes it harder for outsiders to see how much demand is real.
The same dollars can show up in more than one deal, which makes the totals look bigger and risk harder to measure. That could explain why such a big number came with a stock drop.
The rest of Nvidia's deal book shows why investors have questions.
Last month, Nvidia widened its partnership with South Korea's SK Group. Their combined dealings would total more than $500 billion.
The FT also reported that Nvidia is negotiating to provide up to $250 billion in backup support so OpenAI can rent computing capacity from a data center project in the US. If the numbers hold, that would be one of the largest customer financing deals Nvidia has ever set up.
Nvidia is also in talks to put its money behind $350 billion of OpenAI chip orders linked to the same project. In other words, Nvidia is both a chip supplier to OpenAI and a possible financial backer for the same project.
And last month, Nvidia said it made a significant investment in Safe Superintelligence Inc., an AI company that Ilya Sutskever, formerly OpenAI's chief scientist, helped create. That is another sign that Nvidia's hands are in many parts of the AI world at once.
The FT did not say which projects or companies would get the money, what form the financing would take, or whether the $500 billion is new money or money already promised elsewhere. With that much left open, some of the $500 billion could overlap with the SK Group or OpenAI numbers.
Until those details show up, the size of the announcement may be the only clear thing about it.
This story matters beyond Nvidia. It is a reminder that the AI boom is becoming a financing story, and financing stories can move broad markets.
For your portfolio, the key number is not $500 billion. It is how much of this plan becomes real.
The next few months will show whether this is a plan with real projects behind it, or just a very large headline.
Download the free Always Be Buying eBook and start putting your money to work today