1. Nvidia turned compute into collateral, and six of the biggest asset managers signed up.
On August 10 Nvidia signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to build compute financing platforms, targeting more than $500 billion of third-party capital. Nvidia puts up no money. The six firms raise it and Nvidia hardware is the collateral. Jensen Huang's argument is that GPUs are "fungible and transferable across customers and operators," which is what a lender needs to hear before writing against something it might have to take back. Data centers already get financed like real estate. This moves the financeable unit down to the chips inside them.
Why you care: Six of the largest alternative managers opened the same product line in one announcement. That is infrastructure, credit and TMT work, and those groups will expect you to know it.
Interview angle: "Nvidia is doing to compute what the market already did to data centers, moving it off one company's capex line and into something outside capital can fund. A lender's question is what happens in a default, and the answer here is that GPUs are transferable, so you repossess and re-lease. If that holds, compute prices like infrastructure. If useful life comes in short, it prices like equipment, and residual value is where it breaks."