The chipmaker has asked the Apollo-owned broadband provider to let it repurpose some of its legacy real estate to house a distributed system of processing hubs. The formal request targets more than 130 of Brightspeed’s telephone buildings, which Nvidia says could provide roughly 1 gigawatt of available power—capacity that the company estimates would support tens of billions of dollars in Vera Rubin chip systems.
By utilizing sites with existing power hookups and zoning, Nvidia intends to bypass the permitting delays and regulatory hurdles associated with building new large-scale data centers. The proposed network would cover as many as 20 states using assets that Apollo integrated into Brightspeed after purchasing Lumen’s local phone operations for $7.5B in 2022.