Jensen Huang's sudden exit from Nvidia has thrown one of the most ambitious projects of the AI boom into doubt: a $500 billion plan to turn the company's chips into a new kind of financial asset. Months after its high-profile launch, the platform has not closed a single deal — and the man who drove it is gone.
In August, Huang appeared on television flanked by executives from six of Wall Street's biggest firms — Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR — to announce a platform that would collectively finance AI computing deals worth $500 billion. The idea was to treat Nvidia's AI infrastructure as an asset class that debt could be written against, unlocking a flood of capital for the data centres powering the AI boom.
A $500 billion platform with no deals yet
Three months on, the platform has produced nothing. No deals have emerged from the partnership, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg, and work on the first transactions has stalled. At this point, the earliest Nvidia could likely announce any deal is January — and that assumes Huang's dramatic exit does not derail the transactions, or the project itself.
The problems started before Huang left. In the past month, some customers and Wall Street partners pressed Nvidia to increase the size of its financing backstop, the guarantee that underpins the whole structure. Nvidia had offered a so-called residual value support agreement covering up to 25% of deals — a smaller share than rival Broadcom has offered — and partners wanted more.
The backstop fight
The backstop matters because it decides who loses money if the AI buildout slows. If a customer defaults on a loan secured against Nvidia chips, the residual value support determines how much of the shortfall Nvidia itself absorbs. A bigger backstop makes lenders comfortable; a smaller one leaves them exposed. With no deals closed after months of work, the haggling over that number has become the platform's central obstacle.
Huang was the project's driving force. "That was all driven by [Huang]," Jay Goldberg, a senior analyst at Seaport Research Partners, told CNN, adding that the deal is not finalised and could fall through. People familiar with Nvidia's investment decisions told The Information that interim chief executive Colette Kress had repeatedly raised objections to deals Huang pushed, and that her more conservative style means she is unlikely to advance them at anything like his pace.
What Huang's exit changes
The uncertainty lands at a fragile moment for Nvidia. Shares fell nearly 7% during trading on Thursday after the resignation was announced, and have dropped more than 25% over the past two weeks. Huang resigned as president, chief executive and director, effective immediately, after reports of extramarital affairs and a board investigation into whether he was the target of a foreign intelligence effort.
The financing platform was only one strand of a much larger bet. Nvidia committed $105 billion in August for an OpenAI data centre, is expected to take a $10 billion stake in Anthropic's initial public offering, and has poured more than $140 billion into AI startups, cloud providers and frontier labs over the past three years, according to reports. That web of commitments made Huang the AI industry's central dealmaker — and his exit leaves the industry asking who, if anyone, can keep it together.
The $500 billion platform waits. Wall Street's biggest firms signed up to finance the AI boom on Huang's word. Whether they still want to do it without him is the question that will decide whether the plan survives at all.
