Nvidia and Digital Realty’s AI factory ambitions run into a financing wall

Nvidia wants to build AI factories at gigawatt scale. Digital Realty wants to be the landlord. The two companies are deepening a collaboration centered on Nvidia’s AI Factory Research Center, housed at Digital Realty’s Northern Virginia campus. Together they are developing the Omniverse DSX blueprint, a framework for building scalable, gigawatt-class AI compute facilities designed for customers who are not Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. The $500 billion question On August 10, 2026, Nvidia announced memoranda of understanding with six major asset management firms, including Apollo and BlackRock, targeting more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure buildout. The focus is explicitly on non-hyperscale environments, the tier of compute infrastructure below the mega-campuses run by cloud giants. These facilities serve enterprises, governments, and research institutions that need serious GPU capacity but are not building their own sovereign clouds. Digital Realty is coming to the table with its own capital formation already underway. In March 2026, the company closed a $3.25 billion US hyperscale data center fund, which it says is designed to support more than $10 ...