Nvidia and Elon Musk’s xAI have joined a $30 billion AI infrastructure fund led by BlackRock, Microsoft, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. Announced on March 19, the fund aims to raise up to $100 billion to build AI data centers and secure energy sources for large-scale computing. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized that AI factories powered by Nvidia’s technology will help industries achieve breakthroughs by transforming data into intelligence.
The fund, launched last year by Microsoft and BlackRock, seeks to address the increasing demand for high-performance computing as AI advances. Huang highlighted at Nvidia’s developer conference that AI is moving toward reasoning models and agents, requiring significantly more computational power than traditional large language models.
Unlike basic AI models that provide instant answers, reasoning models engage in complex back-and-forth processing, demanding 100 times more computation while needing to be 10 times faster to maintain responsiveness.
Huang’s remarks come amid discussions about AI hardware requirements, following reports that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek trained a high-performing AI model using only 2,000 Nvidia H800 chips—far fewer than the tens of thousands typically needed by major AI firms like OpenAI. Despite this, Huang asserted that the industry’s rapid evolution will continue to drive high demand for Nvidia’s GPUs.
The BlackRock-Microsoft AI fund is one of several large-scale AI infrastructure initiatives. Earlier this year, SoftBank and OpenAI announced the “Stargate” project, a separate $100 billion effort to expand AI capabilities. These investments reflect the growing urgency to develop robust infrastructure to support AI’s next phase, reinforcing the industry’s reliance on advanced computing power.
