Playing the AI infrastructure trade comes in a variety of ways. The more long-lived infrastructure play can consist of the stocks of neoclouds, data center-connected REITs, or hyperscalers themselves. The recent news with Nvidia’s partnership with financiers with KKR, Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs for a $500-billion compute financing platform is a sign of the times.
Conceptually, the large-scale investment will become diversified across a pool of capital beyond the Nvidias, Microsofts and Metas. This trend was already starting to emerge through Meta’s financing arrangements in El Paso and Louisiana’s Hyperion for its large-scale projects.
Constructing compute capacity
Last October 2025 at the North America Blockchain Summit (NABS), top public crypto miners discussed the market shifts from crypto mining facilities’ capacity to AI and high-performance computing. At the “Capacity is the New Commodity” talk at NABS, representatives of Iren, Core Scientific, and Riot were present. In an article I highlighted still-relevant takeaways, which I’ll update too:
1) “Interconnection queues were a problem to get sites energized. In Texas’ ERCOT grid, 189 gigawatts were noted as being in the queue.”
Now, that queue is over 400 (much of which is not real). The state is pausing to better review these project. Still, plans are in full swing for large players.
2) “Speed to being energized is more valued now because capacity is in crunch mode. Notably, sites that have power online within, say, 24 months, are much more valuable than those sites that are to be energized in 2030. There’s a premium on existing assets, or capacity, and existing sites that can power up quicker.”