Nvidia pitches GPUs as investable assets while Amazon expands drone network to 500 cities

Nvidia is working with Wall Street's largest financial firms to securitize compute infrastructure, positioning data center GPUs as revenue-generating assets comparable to real estate or equipment leases. The move comes as Amazon announced its Prime Air drone delivery service will reach nearly 500 U.S. cities by year-end—a sixfold expansion from current coverage.

The compute-as-asset push involves Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR structuring $500 billion in financing around AI chip infrastructure. "These are revenue-generating assets now. They're productive, they're long-lived, they're fungible, they're flexible," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC, calling chips an "investable asset class" for the first time.

The framing contradicts Huang's 2025 remarks that last-generation Hopper chips would become worthless once Blackwell shipped. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink compared the initiative to 1970s mortgage-backed securities—a parallel that carries historical baggage given how that market collapsed when mortgages were overproduced.

Rental prices for older GPU models have been climbing despite concerns about data center oversupply and increasingly capable open-source models from Chinese developers requiring less compute. One cloud provider nearly doubled B200 chip rental rates during a contract renewal, according to reporting by The Verge.

Meanwhile, Amazon's logistics expansion relies on different hardware. Prime Air will add metro areas including Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta, and Boise to its existing 11 locations. Each site covers roughly 175 square miles and handles packages up to 5 pounds, with most deliveries arriving within 60 minutes of checkout.

Vice president David Carbon said the service has delivered "hundreds of thousands of packages" in 2026. Amazon emphasized its "industry-leading Detect-and-Avoid system" after previous incidents involving drones crashing into cranes, internet cables, and buildings.

In China's robotics sector, Unitree Robotics surged 620 percent in its Shanghai market debut, reaching a $66 billion valuation before closing up 460 percent. The Hangzhou-based company shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025 and this week unveiled a model marketed as capable of jumping two meters and running 12.66 meters per second.

The IPO marks mainland China's first public listing of a humanoid robotics maker, positioning Unitree against competitors including AgiBot, Tesla, and Boston Dynamics. Rinat Mirzaitov of Humanoid Analytics noted Unitree is "one of the few companies in humanoid robotics with genuine revenue."

Both developments reflect capital flowing toward physical infrastructure—whether compute clusters or delivery networks—as companies seek returns from AI and automation capabilities. The sustainability of these valuations depends on whether demand for AI compute continues scaling and whether drone delivery achieves the unit economics Amazon projects.