Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang says the artificial intelligence (AI) industry has reached a point where building computing capacity is no longer just a technology investment but an infrastructure challenge.

That is the thinking behind Nvidia’s partnership with six of Wall Street’s biggest investment firms to help finance AI infrastructure projects expected to support more than $500 billion of investment. The partnerships bring together Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to create pools of long-term capital for customers building AI infrastructure.

Asked why Nvidia was bringing together some of Wall Street’s biggest financiers, Huang told CNBC that the industry is going through a fundamental shift in how computing is viewed. “This is really quite extraordinary. This is a phase shift in the way that people think about computing. It used to be technology. Now it’s infrastructure,” Huang said.

He added that Nvidia’s AI factory platform has evolved from selling chips to becoming “an investable asset, an infrastructure asset,” arguing that AI computing is now productive infrastructure that generating economic value rather than simply being a technology purchase.

Explaining why such large pools of capital are now required, Huang said, “The computer is now part of the infrastructure, like electricity, like the internet, and so you have to think about it like it’s infrastructure and build it out accordingly. Every company will be powered by it, every country will build it.”

He noted that each gigawatt of AI infrastructure could require investments of $50-60 billion, making long-term institutional capital critical to supporting the industry’s next phase of growth.

Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer David Solomon said the initiative reflects the scale of capital needed to build AI infrastructure. “The capital markets are signaling that there’s lots of capital available to support it, and we’re trying to find all the different ways that we, as an organisation… can participate in getting the capital to the right places to extend this or accelerate this infrastructure buildout,” Solomon said.

BlackRock Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink added that the financing requirement could eventually extend well beyond the initial commitment. “We’re going to have to raise trillions of dollars over the coming years… you’re going to see more and more allocation into this asset class,” Fink said, describing AI infrastructure as one of the next major long-term investment opportunities for institutional capital.