NVIDIA Corp. and Elon Musk’s xAI on Wednesday said they have joined a consortium backed by Microsoft Corp., BlackRock, and investment firms Global Infrastructure Partners and MGX to expand artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure in the U.S.
The rechristened AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), first announced in September with a goal to initially invest more than $30 billion in AI-related projects, also now includes GE Vernova and NextEra Energy to help the group “accelerate the scaling of critical and diverse energy solutions for AI data centers,” AIP said.
“We believe this unparalleled partnership of leading global companies across the AI ecosystem brings technology expertise together with private capital to meet this demand,” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said in a statement.
AIP’s investments, which will focus on U.S. partners and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is one of a handful of large organizations created to bankroll domestic data centers and energy facilities necessary to power the vast amounts of energy required for AI applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Energy consumption needed for training AI models and large-scale data processing require immense computational power, prompting tech companies to deploy thousands of chips in clusters to meet demand.
The highest-profile project yet to address soaring energy demands, Stargate, was introduced by President Donald Trump at the White House in January. The private sector initiative, spearheaded by SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle Corp., plans to mobilize up to $500 billion over four years. So far, investors have committed $100 billion for immediate deployment.
Separately, Apple Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have vowed to splurge billions of dollars on AI-related infrastructure facilities, headlined by Apple’s $500 billion pledge over several years shortly after company CEO Tim Cook recently met with Trump.
Thirst for data centers and AI facilities — even nuclear plants, in the case of Microsoft, Amazon and Meta — is only likely to increase in the wake of almost daily AI product rollouts from nearly every company in the tech industry.
NVIDIA’s participation in AIP comes after the company announced a slew of AI-related products and services at its GTC developers conference in San Jose, Calif., earlier this week. On Tuesday, NVIDIA introduced a faster AI chip (Blackwell Ultra), GPU (Vera Rubin), automotive technology accord with General Motors Co., humanoid robot project (GROOT N1), physical AI reasoning models (Cosmos), operating system of an AI factory (Dynamo), and more that will soak up vast amounts of energy, according to industry analysts.
