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Nvidia and xAI join BlackRock’s $30 billion AI infrastructure fund

The tech rivals are joining forces in one of the largest private sector pushes for AI infrastructure.

3/19/25 10:59AM

Nvidia and Elon Musk’s xAI are the latest to join a major AI infrastructure consortium backed by Microsoft, investment fund MGX, and BlackRock, the companies announced Wednesday. The move strengthens a rampant effort to expand AI data centers and energy facilities across the US as competition in the space heats up.

Now named the AI Infrastructure Partnership, the Microsoft- and BlackRock-backed group was formed last year with an initial $30 billion investment to help build data centers and support applications like ChatGPT. Nvidia initially joined as a technical advisor and MGX was an investor in xAI’s recent $6 billion Series C raise.

The expansion comes two months after President Donald Trump introduced Stargate, a separate AI infrastructure initiative backed by SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle. Stargate aims to mobilize up to $500 billion, with investors already committing $100 billion for immediate deployment. Still, with Nvidia and xAI now on board, the AI Infrastructure Partnership is on pace to be one of the biggest private sector pushes yet.

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OpenAI’s ARR reached over $20 billion in 2025, CFO says

Sam Altman’s $500 billion artificial intelligence behemoth hit a major financial milestone last year, according to a new blog post over the weekend from OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, as the company confirmed it had hit a more than $20 billion annual revenue run rate at the end of 2025.

Elsewhere in the blog post, Friar spent time addressing the company’s shifting goals, referencing plans to “close the distance between where intelligence is advancing and how individuals, companies, and countries actually adopt and use it.” As has become customary in the AI company press release genre, the CFO was also keen to tout the unending growth of the business, writing:

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”

And, perhaps most importantly for current backers and those keeping an eye on the private company before its rumored mega IPO:

“Revenue followed the same curve growing 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025: $2B ARR in 2023, $6B in 2024, and $20B+ in 2025. This is never-before-seen growth at such scale.”

That latest figure has certainly set tongues in the tech world wagging, just as the company announced it would begin rolling out ads to free and ChatGPT Go users. It also puts the chatbot giant a fair way ahead of competitors like Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

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A business that scales with the value of intelligence

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”