Nvidia just lined up $500 billion. Frank Holmes says the thing that’s scarce isn’t money, it’s copper
On August 10, Nvidia signed a memorandum of understanding with six of the largest asset managers on earth to mobilize more than $500 billion of third-party capital for AI infrastructure , splitting investor opinion.
Frank Holmes, executive chairman of HIVE, recently joined TheStreet Roundtable to share his thoughts on the deal.
"I think it's huge. It just goes to show that something bigger is happening," he said.
The deals include Apollo, BlackRock , Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, with each creating their own platform, structured so outside investors can fund data centres, power and GPU clusters without loading Nvidia's balance sheet.
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Seven executives sat with CNBC's Becky Quick the same day in a rare joint interview , which Holmes said, "It's like the Avengers."
Holmes read is that solving the finance problem exposes the next one. Capital is now cheap and abundant but the materials that the supply chain relies on, including copper, power, and other critical minerals, are not.
The bottleneck nobody's pricing
Holmes pointed towards the lack of supply for the different metals needed to construct data centers.
"Copper's making new highs," he said. "A gigawatt data center is gonna consume fifty thousand tons of copper. The supply's not there, so prices are ratcheting higher."
At time of writing, copper was trading at $6.67 per pound, up more than 16% from January 1, 2026. Lithium and other critical minerals are facing the same squeeze.
He also pointed out that China's grip on many of these minerals could become a geopolitical problem for the rest of the world.
"I see nothing but delays in the supply line before China comes in to try to interfere with direct holding back on any type of strategic mineral," Holmes said.
Most analysts would see a supply crunch, a price spike, and an adversary with a hand on the tap as bearish for the ongoing AI buildout. Holmes lands somewhere else entirely.
"I say this is very bullish."
That only makes sense if you follow which side of the trade he's on. Holmes isn't arguing that the buildout gets easier. In his opinion, it is going to get more expensive, more slowly delivered, and more valuable to anyone already holding the scarce inputs.
Nvidia's six financing platforms solved the capital problem, but they did nothing about the copper.
It is, in other words, a commodities trade wearing a technology costume. Which is why the man running a bitcoin and AI compute company keeps a gold and resources hat within arm's reach.
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They don't need a Porsche
The standard objection to the AI buildout has been that the chips will go obsolete before the surrounding infrastructure is ready to power them. Holmes rejects that premise.
"I think we've got a beautiful five-year, six-year run rate here. You have a suite of GPU chips, and they first come out, for simplicity, for a simple number, I'm getting a dollar an hour per chip. A year later, I'm getting 80 cents per chip. And then I'm getting 60 cents a chip. But I'm running the chip off. And all of a sudden, around 40 cents, it keeps going," he said.
The floor holds because the buyer changes.
"There's no one happy meal like at McDonald's. Everyone's ordering a la carte. They just don't need to drive a Porsche. They want to have a fast car, but they don't need a Porsche," he explained.
Everything Nvidia announced rests on one number nobody can prove yet. If a GPU earns for six years, the platforms work and the paper amortizes faster that the hardware decays. If it earns for three, $500 billion of third-party capital finds out at the same time. Holmes is betting on six. So is Wall Street.
This story was originally published by TheStreet on Aug 31, 2026, where it first appeared in the MARKETS section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
