Nvidia, Elon Musk's xAI to join Microsoft, BlackRock to develop AI infrastructure

In a significant step toward building a robust artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States, Nvidia and Elon Musk’s xAI have joined forces with a consortium backed by Microsoft and BlackRock, the companies announced on Wednesday. The collaboration aims to enhance the development of AI infrastructure as the global competition to dominate this rapidly advancing technology heats up.

The consortium, now rebranded as the AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), was initially formed last year with a vision to pour more than $30 billion into AI-related projects, including data centers and energy facilities designed to support advanced AI applications like ChatGPT. According to the group, AIP has attracted substantial capital and partner interest since its inception, though exact figures remain undisclosed.

Nvidia will continue in its role as a technical advisor to the consortium, which also counts the Abu Dhabi-backed investment firm MGX and BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners among its members. The group is actively working to raise up to $100 billion through a combination of investor funding, asset ownership, and corporate partnerships, including debt financing.

The initiative comes just two months after U.S. President Donald Trump announced Stargate, a private sector AI infrastructure project backed by SoftBank Group, OpenAI, and Oracle. Stargate aims to deploy up to $500 billion to strengthen AI infrastructure, with $100 billion already committed for immediate deployment and the remainder expected over the next four years.

The heightened focus on AI infrastructure arises from the increasing demand for computational power required to train large-scale AI models and process enormous amounts of data. Companies like Nvidia are producing specialised chips deployed in clusters, driving the growth of purpose-built data centers.