KKR Taps Nvidia, Kuwaiti Fund To Launch $10B Data Center Business
Private equity giant KKR is teaming up with Nvidia and Kuwait’s sovereign wealth fund to launch a new data center developer and operator.
KKR debuted Helix Digital Infrastructure on Thursday with more than $10B in capital commitments, promising to be a single coordination point for hyperscalers’ data center, power and connectivity needs. Adam Selipsky, former CEO of Amazon Web Services, is leading the new company.
Chipmaking behemoth Nvidia will serve as a strategic partner at Helix to support the deployment of its chips with a focus on maximizing efficiency and achieving the lowest total cost of ownership.
Irving, Texas-based power company Vistra, which already serves 5 million customers and is approaching 50,000 megawatts of capacity, will be Helix’s preferred power provider.
The publicly traded energy firm’s stock was up more than 4% in early trading Thursday. KKR was trading down nearly 3%, while the broader S&P 500 was generally flat.
The Kuwait Investment Authority rounds out the anchor investors for the new platform, which KKR said Thursday was open to additional institutional capital. Waldemar Szlezak, KKR’s global head of digital infrastructure, is also joining Helix as chief investment officer.
“We view AI infrastructure as one of the defining long-term investment opportunities globally, and Helix is purpose-built to address it,” said Sheikh Saoud Salem Abdulaziz Al-Sabah, the managing director of the Kuwaiti sovereign wealth fund.
Helix’s launch comes as artificial intelligence is starting to see widespread corporate adoption, which has led to sticker shock at major firms. Usage of the tools by rank-and-file employees is consuming huge amounts of tokens, the units AI systems use to process data, and running up unexpectedly large bills, leading some firms to scale back the pace of integration.
Nvidia’s partnership with Helix will focus on developing projects with its Nvidia DSX architecture, which is optimized for efficiency and aims to maximize the tokens per watt the data centers can process.
“Useful AI has arrived, and demand for AI factories is extraordinary,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “We are bringing together a proven AI factory blueprint, world-class infrastructure expertise from KKR, and long-term capital to help AI cloud providers build the next generation of intelligence infrastructure.”
Helix will leverage Vistra's existing infrastructure to deliver near-term power to clients “while also bringing additionality with Vistra’s best-in-class capabilities, including power generation development and power grid expertise,” the announcement says. KKR declined to comment on whether Helix would itself develop any power plants.
KKR management has flagged energy as a key bottleneck for AI adoption. The firm is particularly interested in renewable energy investments given their relative cost compared to other production methods, Raj Agrawal, KKR’s head of real assets, said at a conference Wednesday.
“The average iPhone user today uses about 500 times more data than the average BlackBerry user used,” Agrawal told attendees, Bloomberg reported. “We are so early in how we are using AI as companies. We are so early in how we’re using AI as individuals.”
KKR is one of the largest global alternative asset managers on the planet, with $758B in global assets under management at the end of March, including more than $100B in infrastructure assets.
Private credit’s concentration in AI and related investments has been closely scrutinized in the past year, with fears of overexposure leading to a stock sell-off in March, but corporate debt has been the cause of most of the consternation, while loans tied to data centers and other infrastructure look more structurally sound.
