Abstract:
More than a week ago, Huang Minshan, the daughter of Nvidia’s rising star and CEO Jensen Huang, held a wedding in Hawaii. Huang introduced her husband, Nico Caprec, a former professional skier, to Nvidia two and a half years ago.
And he is no ordinary employee. The 35-year-old Caprec has quickly grown into one of Nvidia’s core executives and is also the main interface for many customers and partners. Several relevant company executives said that he is responsible for managing billions of dollars' worth of partnerships between Nvidia and emerging cloud vendors and other data center-related companies, providing these companies with financial support and sales leads, and helping them continue to build computing facilities equipped with Nvidia chips.
Huang Minshan and Capretz, both 35 years old, formed a powerful partnership. Some employees believe that with 63-year-old CEO Jensen Huang at the helm, the two may become the backbone of Nvidia's future leadership.
An NVIDIA employee who works with Caprez said: "I think Huang is paving the way for Huang Minshan and Nico to take over the next phase of the work." Another employee said that NVIDIA's current operating model is much more like a family business than the outside world thinks, which is very rare in the technology industry. (Huang Renxun’s other child, 36-year-old Spencer, will join the company in 2022 as director of product management in the robotics direction. NVIDIA also develops its own chip systems and supporting software for the robotics business.)
Huang Renxun hopes to build Nvidia into a role similar to a "central bank", providing financial support to customers, and uniting financial institutions to implement loans using expensive chips and supporting hardware as collateral to support the continued advancement of the AI boom. Caprec is the core executor of this strategy. In August this year, Caprec participated in promoting a plan jointly released by Nvidia and private equity institutions such as Wall Street and Blackstone to raise US$500 billion from investors to finance the purchase of Nvidia chips for data centers. However, many details of the plan have not yet been finalized.
As borrowing costs for data center projects rise and local political factors in the United States slow down the construction progress of some projects, Capretz's task becomes increasingly critical.
For example, this summer, Caprec took the lead in promoting Nvidia to invest in two leading American companies, which specialize in securing land and power resources for data centers. This investment transaction aims to lock in the short-term power rights of computing power facilities and ensure that the facilities can continue to be equipped with multiple generations of NVIDIA chips for many years to come. This investment is also expected to avoid the risk of oversupply of chips that data center developers, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and others are worried about: lagging power grid construction and local public opposition will cause newly purchased AI hardware to have power but no network, leaving it idle.
Sikander Rashid, global head of AI infrastructure at Brookfield Asset Management, said: "Kapretz's vision is to help NVIDIA control the AI infrastructure ecosystem." Brookfield owns a number of data center companies that use NVIDIA chips, and Rashid communicates with Kapretz every week.
Nvidia Senior Vice President Vladimir Troy, who has worked with Kapretz for many years, succinctly commented: "Nico is very important." A cloud vendor executive who has met with Kapretz called him "Huang Renxun's confidant."
Rashid and other partners said that Capretz is good at negotiating and is especially good at designing financial solutions such as credit guarantees. Multiple people familiar with the matter said that it was Caprez who led the credit support agreement reached between Nvidia and Australian emerging cloud vendor Firmus in June this year. Firmus used this to obtain a loan to purchase 170,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips, with the total purchase amount likely to exceed US$15 billion. In exchange, Nvidia can share in the project's future cloud business revenue starting from Firmus leasing these chips early next year.
This transaction is part of a new financing plan led by Capretz, hoping to leverage more funds for AI data centers, especially in areas where this type of credit business is not yet mature.
Caprec has kept a low profile and refused to be interviewed. But the situation may change: in the past two months, he has attended industry forum roundtables on behalf of NVIDIA many times, and posted on LinkedIn that "AI has become core infrastructure" and NVIDIA chips have "bankability attributes"; his views were also quoted in multiple press releases related to NVIDIA's investment in data center companies this summer.
"If you have any questions, please contact Nico"
Before joining Nvidia, Caprec came from the Engadine Valley in eastern Switzerland and was a professional skier. In the early 2010s, he represented Switzerland in alpine skiing events, competing in super-G, slalom and downhill events.
After ending his skiing career in 2013, Caprec shifted from taking physical risks to decision-making risks, eventually working as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group in Zurich.
A few years later, he entered the London Business School's master's program and became classmates with Huang Minshan. The two graduated in 2021. After graduating from business school, Huang Minshan joined Nvidia, while Caprec went to Zurich-based PSquared Asset Management as an investment analyst. This small institution reportedly manages about US$750 million in assets.
In early 2024, Caprec moved to Silicon Valley and joined NVIDIA, where Huang Minshan works, as a corporate development manager. Not long after joining the company, NVIDIA's market value reached the top of the global companies. Some NVIDIA partners revealed that even as a newcomer, he immediately participated in a number of core meetings with customers and partners.
Jas Kehra, head of the AI business of private equity giant Blackstone, recalled that he met with Caprez around this period, and the two parties discussed how to expand the landmark cooperation reached in the previous fall: providing a US$2.3 billion credit line to cloud vendor CoreWeave, using Nvidia graphics cards as collateral.
This early deal is essentially the beginning of Nvidia's push to make GPUs a type of financial asset that can be valued and easily traded, making it easier for chip buyers to use chips as collateral for loans.
Kapretz helped Blackstone finalize a larger $7.5 billion credit agreement with CoreWeave, Kehra said.
OneChronos CEO Kelly Littlepage is building an AI server auction trading market. He said that he would discuss with Caprec in early 2025 how the trading platform evaluates the full life cycle value of server chips. Littlepage said that Capretz quickly understood the logic of GPU residual value evaluation, and this evaluation system is the basis for lenders to provide financing for chip projects.
"Obviously, he is NVIDIA's top analyst," Littlepage commented. "He is very good at stripping away complicated information and getting to the core."
The GPU mortgage debt market is at least tens of billions of dollars, and Nvidia hopes to expand the market further. If GPU wants to become a widely recognized and tradable asset class like aircraft and shipping equipment, it is still in its infancy. It still needs more support from debt investors and regulatory agencies to obtain approval for GPU debt-related futures hedging tools.
Brookfield's Rashid said that in 2025, when Huang Renxun met with him for the first time to discuss selling AI servers to governments and promoting the concept of sovereign AI, he praised Kapretz. "Huang Renxun's original words are basically: If you have something to do, look for Nico."
Many collaborators said that as emerging cloud vendors such as CoreWeave and Firmus become increasingly important to Nvidia, Capretz's authority continues to expand. Less than two years after joining the company, in January this year, Capretz was directly promoted from director to vice president of global AI infrastructure growth, skipping the senior director level.
According to people familiar with the organizational structure, Capretz currently reports to Nick Parker, Nvidia’s new executive vice president of global business, and Parker reports to Jensen Huang. An Nvidia executive said that Capretz's close contact with Huang is more important than his or her rank in the organization.
A few months later, Huang Minshan was also promoted in March this year to serve as senior director of product marketing for physical AI (mostly robotics). Her immediate superior is the vice president, and she reports to Huang Renxun.
Brookfield's Rasheed repeated Huang's original words: "If you have something to do, talk to Nico."
In the past two years, Huang Minshan's scope of responsibilities has been continuously expanded, and she is responsible for the marketing and promotion of NVIDIA's 3D world models, robot models, simulation models, and various open source projects to attract more application developers to use NVIDIA hardware. This summer, NVIDIA held a media conference related to the Nemotron open source AI model, and Huang Minshan attended. NVIDIA invests billions of dollars every year to develop this model to benchmark Anthropic and OpenAI's closed-source large models. Out of the same strategic considerations, Nvidia recently spent approximately US$20 billion to acquire the open source model hosting platform Hugging Face, and obtained technology authorization from the open source AI company Poolside.
Huang Minshan also often attends international conferences with her father, and accompanies Huang Renxun to finalize cooperation with supply chain and manufacturing partners.
Connecting resources from all parties
Capretz also travels around the world to connect with customers, investors and partners, and sometimes attends meetings with Jen-Hsun Huang and Minshan Huang. Several executives from emerging cloud vendors said that Capretz is their primary contact person at Nvidia, and the two parties communicate weekly or even more frequently. He mainly helps emerging cloud vendors connect with customers and financing channels.
An executive of an emerging cloud vendor said that Capretz called earlier this year to inform him that an AI development company was in urgent need of server chips and that the cloud vendor could quickly take orders. The cloud vendor finally completed the delivery, and the AI developer became one of its largest customers.
An executive at another emerging cloud vendor said Capretz pushed potential customer leads to business executives through WhatsApp groups. Other executives said Capretz helps companies find scarce available land and power resources.
Currently, Capretz co-leads the NVIDIA Cloud Partner Program. The project includes dozens of cloud vendors, the vast majority of which are emerging cloud companies. These manufacturers build data centers according to NVIDIA standards and use NVIDIA hardware. Another co-leader of the project is Raj Mirpuri, a senior vice president with more than 20 years of experience. This project existed before Caprez joined the company, and traditional cloud vendors such as Amazon and Google were not included in it.
An NVIDIA employee who tracks cloud partner projects said that the revenue contribution of such emerging cloud vendors may account for half of NVIDIA's total revenue in the future, helping NVIDIA reduce its dependence on traditional cloud vendors such as Amazon and Google. Although traditional cloud vendors purchase large quantities of NVIDIA chips, they develop their own AI chips and also purchase NVIDIA competing hardware. Since the rise of the AI wave, supporting emerging cloud vendors has been Huang Renxun's key strategy. However, the current revenue of such companies only accounts for a dozen percentage points of Nvidia's total revenue.
In August this year, Caprec participated in formulating a financing plan for Nvidia to join Wall Street and private equity institutions to raise US$500 billion to purchase Nvidia AI hardware. The revenue generated by the AI business is currently far from enough to cover the huge investment in computing facilities. The success of this financing plan will determine how long the AI data center construction boom can continue.
When the plan was released, NVIDIA stated that it could provide up to 25% credit support for data center projects in cooperative projects, but the specific agreement has not yet been implemented. Kehra said he and Caprec had dinner last week to finalize more details of the collaboration.
Kapretz never spoke casually, Kehra commented. But when Huang Renxun assigned follow-up tasks at the end of the meeting, it was obvious that he entrusted a lot of important tasks to Caprec.
Huang Renxun’s trust
Executives who have negotiated with Caprec said that although he negotiates tough, he usually remains rational and communicates constructively in meetings. Rashid said: "Sometimes the negotiation atmosphere is tense, and he will suddenly make a joke to lighten the atmosphere."
Although emerging cloud vendors are highly dependent on this chip design company, Nvidia still has conflicts with them. An executive at an emerging cloud vendor said Nvidia actually dominates the way they do business to a large extent. For example, if Nvidia chip delivery is delayed, cloud vendors will be discouraged from purchasing hardware from other vendors. (NVIDIA disagrees with this statement. Dionne Harris, senior director of high-performance computing at NVIDIA, said that the company allows customers to freely combine hardware and "use whatever they want.")
Huang frequently points out to emerging cloud vendors their dependence on Nvidia. He mentioned in the "Dwarkesh" podcast earlier this year: "For cloud vendors, if we had not supported CoreWeave, these emerging cloud and AI cloud companies would not exist at all."
At present, only a few emerging cloud vendors have annual revenue exceeding US$200 million, and none of them has yet achieved profitability. Huang Renxun most likely hopes to avoid the situation of large emerging cloud companies acquiring smaller peers.
This means that Caprez has a heavy burden on his shoulders and needs to promote the steady development of these enterprises. The AI computing power cooperation plan launched by NVIDIA is one of the measures, such as reaching a credit guarantee with Firmus in exchange for future revenue sharing.
But Caprec and other executives are re-evaluating the structure of the plan. Two people familiar with the matter revealed that larger and more mature emerging cloud vendors such as Nebius have refused to join because they are unwilling to be further financially dependent on chip manufacturers or to compress their own profit margins due to revenue sharing. Another source said that Nvidia is also worried that cloud vendors willing to participate in the plan will become overly financially dependent on Nvidia.
Two people familiar with the matter said that Nvidia is adjusting the investment term sheet and contracts to avoid the above risks.
At the same time, data center lenders are reassessing their risk tolerance and becoming more cautious about funding new projects. Some investors have re-evaluated the valuations of GPU cloud vendors and supporting infrastructure companies, which may affect the ability of some NVIDIA customers and partners to go public for financing and obtain low-cost debt funds.
Huang Renxun also pays close attention to the market's reaction to Nvidia's increasing use of its balance sheet to help expand the AI industry. He often asked subordinates about changes in spreads on credit default swaps on Nvidia's debt, people familiar with the matter said. The spread has roughly doubled in the past two months, representing a slight increase in investors' perception of a default risk on Nvidia's debt. Of course, objectively speaking, its risk is still very low. Nvidia's credit rating given by Moody's is only one level away from the highest level.
Huang Jen-Hsun's high-intensity, around-the-clock work style also seems to have affected Capretz. Business partners commented that Caprec is one of the most hard-working people they have ever met. No matter which time zone he is in, he is always online and responsive.
His and Huang Minshan’s wedding coincided with NVIDIA’s quarterly holiday, and all the company’s employees had two days off on September 24th and 25th. A business associate revealed that even while on vacation in Hawaii, Capretz continued to work and returned to work on Monday, September 28.
Attendees at the dinner said that the next night, the two wore wedding rings to attend an investor dinner hosted by Nvidia in New York.
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