More than a week ago, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA)'s rising executive Madison Huang, daughter of Jensen Huang, held her wedding in Hawaii.

Her husband, Nico Caprez, was once a professional skier. Two and a half years ago, Madison introduced him to NVIDIA. He is no ordinary employee.

At 35 years old, Caprez quickly rose into NVIDIA's core executive ranks and is the primary point of contact for a large number of customers and partners.

Executives at multiple related companies said he manages NVIDIA's multibillion-dollar partnerships with emerging cloud providers and other data center companies, providing them with funding support and sales leads to help them continuously build data centers equipped with NVIDIA chips.

Madison, also 35, and Caprez form a powerful duo. Some employees believe that under the arrangements of 63-year-old CEO Jensen Huang, the two may eventually take charge of NVIDIA's future leadership.

One NVIDIA employee who works with Caprez said, "I think Jensen is grooming Madison and Nico for the next step in succession."

Another employee said NVIDIA now operates far more like a family business than outsiders imagine, which is very rare in the tech industry. (Jensen Huang's other child, 36-year-old Spencer, joined NVIDIA in 2022 as director of robotics product management; NVIDIA also develops robotic chip systems and accompanying software.)

Jensen Huang wants to turn NVIDIA into a role similar to a central bank, directly providing financing to customers and partnering with financial institutions to issue loans backed by expensive chips and hardware as collateral, sustaining the AI boom. Caprez is the core executor of this strategy.

In August, Caprez helped push NVIDIA to join with Wall Street and private equity firms such as Blackstone in a plan to raise $500 billion from investors to finance data center purchases of NVIDIA chips, though many details have yet to be finalized.

Rising borrowing costs for data center projects, combined with local political resistance in the United States that has delayed some construction, have made Caprez's role increasingly critical.

In April, Caprez (left) met with Kazakh President Tokayev. This summer, Caprez led efforts for NVIDIA to take minority stakes in two leading data center land and power service providers.

The investment deal aims to address concerns about chip oversupply among some data center developers (including SpaceX CEO Elon Musk). Grid construction delays and local public opposition could leave completed server rooms without power and chips sitting idle.

Sikander Rashid, global head of AI infrastructure at Brookfield Asset Management, which owns data center assets equipped with NVIDIA chips, said: "Caprez has a grand vision to help NVIDIA capture the entire AI infrastructure ecosystem." Rashid communicates with Caprez every week.

Vice President Vladimir Troy, a longtime NVIDIA employee who works with Caprez, put it simply: "Nico is very important."

A cloud provider executive who has met with him directly called him Jensen Huang's trusted consigliere.

Rashid and other partners said Caprez is a sophisticated dealmaker, especially skilled at designing financial solutions such as credit backstops.

For example, multiple sources said that in June this year, NVIDIA reached a credit support agreement with Australian emerging cloud provider Firmus, which was led by Caprez. Firmus used the deal to obtain loans to purchase 170,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips, with a purchase value exceeding $15 billion.

In exchange, starting early next year, NVIDIA will receive a share of the cloud business revenue generated from renting out these chips.

This deal is part of a new financing program led by Caprez aimed at unlocking more capital for AI data centers, especially in regions where the credit system is not yet mature.

Caprez has always kept a low profile and declined to be interviewed. But things are changing: over the past two months, he has represented NVIDIA multiple times at industry forums; he posted on LinkedIn that "AI has become core infrastructure" and that NVIDIA chips have "financing attributes"; his views were also quoted in several NVIDIA and data center investment-related press releases this summer.

If You Need Something Done, Find Nico

Caprez comes from the Engadin Valley in eastern Switzerland and was a professional skier before joining NVIDIA. In the early 2010s, he represented Switzerland in alpine skiing events including super-G, slalom, and downhill.

After ending his skiing career in 2013, he shifted from bearing physical risks on the slopes to bearing risks in business decisions, later joining Boston Consulting Group in Zurich as a management consultant.

A few years later, he enrolled in a master's program at London Business School, where he became classmates with Madison Huang. The two graduated in 2021.

After business school, Madison joined NVIDIA, while Caprez worked as an investment analyst at the relatively small Zurich-based asset manager PSquared, which manages about $750 million in assets.

In early 2024, Caprez moved to Silicon Valley and joined NVIDIA as a corporate development manager, just as NVIDIA was about to become the world's most valuable company.

NVIDIA partners said that even as a newcomer, he immediately participated in core meetings with customers and partners.

Jas Khera, head of AI at private equity giant Blackstone, recalled meeting Caprez around that time. The two discussed how to expand a landmark project launched the previous year: a $2.3 billion credit line to cloud provider CoreWeave backed by NVIDIA GPUs.

This early deal was essentially NVIDIA's first step in pushing GPUs to become a type of financial asset that can be valued and easily traded, making it easier for chip buyers to borrow against them.

Khera said Caprez pushed Blackstone and CoreWeave to sign a larger $7.5 billion credit agreement.

Kelly Littlepage, CEO of OneChronos, which develops an auction trading platform for AI servers, said that in early 2025 he discussed with Caprez how to assess the full life-cycle value of server chips through a trading platform.

Littlepage said Caprez quickly understood the logic of GPU residual value pricing, which is the basis for lenders financing chips.

"Clearly, he is a star analyst inside NVIDIA," Littlepage said. "He is extremely good at stripping away irrelevant complexity and getting straight to the core."

The GPU-backed debt market is worth at least tens of billions of dollars, and NVIDIA wants to make it even bigger. Whether GPUs can be widely recognized by the market as tradable assets like aircraft and shipping equipment is still at an early stage and requires greater acceptance from credit investors.

Brookfield's Rashid recalled that when the two first met in 2025, they discussed selling AI servers to governments and advancing the sovereign AI concept. Jensen Huang praised Caprez highly on the spot: "If you need something done, find Nico."

As emerging cloud providers like CoreWeave and Firmus become increasingly important to NVIDIA, Caprez's authority and responsibilities have continued to expand. Less than two years after joining, in January this year, he was promoted directly from director to vice president of global AI infrastructure growth, skipping the senior director level.

People familiar with the matter said that organizationally, Caprez reports to NVIDIA's new executive vice president of global field operations, Nick Parker, who in turn reports to Jensen Huang.

An NVIDIA executive said that Caprez's close relationship with Jensen Huang matters more than the organizational reporting chain.

Several months later, in March, Madison Huang was also promoted, becoming senior director of product marketing for physical AI (mostly robotics). Her supervisor is also a vice president, who reports to Jensen Huang.

Over the past few years, Madison's scope of responsibility has continued to expand, covering NVIDIA's 3D world models, robotics models, simulation models, and marketing for various open-source projects, with the goal of attracting more application developers to use NVIDIA hardware.

This summer, she attended a launch event related to NVIDIA's Nemotron open-source large model; NVIDIA invests billions of dollars annually to develop this model to compete with the closed-source models of Anthropic and OpenAI.

For the same strategic reason, NVIDIA in recent weeks spent a total of about $20 billion to acquire open-source model platform Hugging Face and license technology from open-source AI company Poolside.

Madison often accompanies her father to international conferences, where Jensen Huang finalizes cooperation with supply chain and manufacturing partners.

Connecting Resources Across Parties

Caprez also travels around the world, meeting customers, investors, and partners, sometimes alongside Jensen Huang and Madison.

Multiple emerging cloud provider executives said Caprez is their primary point of contact at NVIDIA, communicating with them weekly or even more frequently. His core role is helping emerging cloud providers connect with customers while also connecting them with financing channels.

One emerging cloud provider executive said that earlier this year, Caprez called to say an AI developer urgently needed 7,000 GB300 AI servers, and this cloud provider had an opportunity to deliver quickly. The provider successfully won the order, and the AI developer later became one of its largest customers.

Another emerging cloud provider executive said Caprez pushes potential customer leads to companies through WhatsApp groups. Still another executive mentioned that Caprez helps connect them with scarce data center land and power resources.

Caprez currently co-leads NVIDIA's cloud partner program, whose network includes dozens of cloud providers, the vast majority of which are emerging cloud providers. These providers build server rooms and deploy NVIDIA hardware according to NVIDIA specifications.

The other co-leader of the program is Raj Mirpuri, a veteran vice president with more than 20 years at the company. The program existed before Caprez joined, and traditional cloud providers like Amazon and Google are not part of the system.

An NVIDIA employee who follows the cloud partner program believes that in the future, emerging cloud providers could contribute as much as half of NVIDIA's total revenue, helping reduce NVIDIA's dependence on traditional cloud providers such as Amazon and Google. Although traditional clouds buy large quantities of NVIDIA chips, they also develop their own AI chips and purchase hardware from NVIDIA competitors.

Shortly after the AI boom began, supporting emerging cloud providers became a priority strategy for Jensen Huang, though such providers currently account for only about ten-plus percent of NVIDIA's revenue.

In August, Caprez took part in drafting NVIDIA's plan to join with Wall Street and private equity institutions to raise $500 billion for purchasing NVIDIA AI hardware. Whether this financing materializes will determine how long the AI data center construction boom can continue, as data center capital expenditure is already extremely high.

At the announcement, NVIDIA said it could provide up to 25% credit support for data center projects under this cooperation framework, but specific agreements have not yet been finalized.

Khera said he had dinner with Caprez last week to finalize more details of the cooperation. Khera said Caprez never says much, but when Jensen Huang assigns follow-up tasks at the end of meetings, it is clear that he delegates a great deal of authority and responsibility to Caprez.

Jensen Huang's Trust

Executives who have negotiated with Caprez said he is tough in negotiations, but generally constructive and emotionally stable in meetings. Rashid said: "Sometimes when the conversation gets tense, he suddenly cracks a joke to ease the atmosphere."

Although emerging cloud providers are highly dependent on the chip company, there is still friction between NVIDIA and them. One emerging cloud provider executive said NVIDIA effectively determines to a large extent how they operate their business; for example, when NVIDIA chip deliveries are delayed, it discourages providers from purchasing hardware from other vendors. (NVIDIA disagrees with this account. Dion Harris, senior director of high-performance computing at NVIDIA, said the company wants customers to be free to mix and match any hardware.)

Jensen Huang often reminds emerging cloud providers that they depend on NVIDIA. On the Dwarkesh podcast earlier this year, he said: "For cloud providers, if we hadn't supported CoreWeave in the first place, these emerging clouds and AI clouds wouldn't exist at all."

Currently, only a few emerging cloud providers have annual revenue exceeding $200 million, and none is profitable.

Jensen Huang most likely wants to avoid leading emerging cloud companies acquiring weaker peers. That means Caprez carries a heavy burden and needs to help these companies gain a firm footing.

NVIDIA launched the AI computing partner program, and the Firmus credit guarantee and revenue-sharing arrangement is one example. But Caprez and other executives are reassessing the program's structure.

Two people familiar with the negotiations said that larger emerging cloud providers like Nebius have refused to join, not wanting to become more financially dependent on NVIDIA or to have revenue sharing squeeze their margins.

Another source said NVIDIA is also concerned that cloud providers willing to participate in the program may become overly financially dependent on the company. The two people said NVIDIA is adjusting investment term sheets and contracts to avoid such risks.

At the same time, data center lenders are reassessing their risk tolerance and carefully screening new projects to support. Some investors are reassessing the valuations of GPU cloud providers and supporting infrastructure companies, which could affect the ability of some NVIDIA customers and partners to raise funds through listings.

Jensen Huang is also closely watching the market's reaction to NVIDIA using its balance sheet to support AI expansion. People familiar with the matter said he often asks his team about changes in the spread on NVIDIA's credit default swaps. Over the past two months, that spread has roughly doubled, indicating investors believe the risk of NVIDIA defaulting on its debt has risen slightly compared with before.

Of course, objectively speaking, the risk remains very low; under Moody's ratings, NVIDIA's credit rating is only one notch below the highest level.

Jensen Huang's intense, around-the-clock work style seems to have influenced Caprez. Business partners said Caprez is one of the hardest-working people they have ever met, always online and responsive no matter the time zone.

His wedding to Madison happened to coincide with NVIDIA's two-day quarterly company-wide holiday (September 24 and 25). But partners said Caprez continued working while in Hawaii and was back on the job on Monday, September 28.

One attendee at the dinner said that the next evening, the two attended NVIDIA's investor dinner in New York wearing their wedding rings.