Femi Otedola, the chairman and biggest shareholder of financial services group First HoldCo Plc, hopes to invest $100 million in the proposed private placement of Dangote Petroleum Refinery.

The billionaire tycoon made this known to journalists during a tour by the management team of First HoldCo to the refinery in Lagos on Wednesday.

“On a personal note, I have approved him. I’ve been here with him 25 times, so my compensation is that he’s going to allocate to me shares valued at $100 million in the private placement. That was one of the reasons I sold my shares in Geregu Power Plants — to invest in the IPO of Dangote Refinery,” Mr Otedola said of Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man and owner of the refinery.

Dangote Petroleum Refinery, Africa’s largest oil refinery, is raising $2 billion through a private placement targeting institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals.

READ ALSO: Billionaire, Femi Otedola, among writers shortlisted for BCA African Business Book 2026

A similar plan to source $5 billion through an initial public offering, equivalent to 10 per cent of its valuation, is also in the works. According to a Bloomberg report this month, the refinery is targeting a valuation of around $50 billion ahead of the planned share sales.

Mr Otedola noted that he hopes to invest part of the proceeds from the divestment of his shareholding in Geregu Power, an electricity generation company he took public in October 2022, in the private placement.

He sold his stake in the power company last December in a $750 million transaction.

The refinery is looking to list the shares from the planned offers across multiple stock exchanges through cross-border listings, opening them to investors in different markets.

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang is, perhaps, one of the greatest corporate hype men of all time when it comes to his company. He may even surpass Salesforce’s Marc Benioff when it comes to relentless optimism in his company’s future and revenues.

Even so, he delivers on the hype, quarter after quarter.

Instead of cautioning you to view the proclamation that he’s found a “brand new $200 billion TAM for Nvidia” with skepticism, I’d argue he’s earned a bit of trust.

Huang positioned this massive new market at the feet of Nvidia’s new CPU product, Vera, which was introduced in March. Speaking on Wednesday’s earnings call — after Nvidia posted another record-breaking quarter with $81.6 billion in revenue and forecast $91 billion for the next — Huang pitched Vera as a potentially transformative product. And one that already has promising sales figures.

But no matter how well Nvidia delivers, Wall Street harbors anxiety over what will knock Nvidia from its perch.

Lately, such fears have centered on the CPU. Nvidia is the king of the GPU, whereas historically the CPU markets were owned by companies like Intel and AMD. (Nvidia has made CPUs previously, of course, but that’s not its core business.)

For example, last month Amazon Web Services crowed about a giant contract it signed with Meta for millions of Amazon’s homegrown AI CPUs. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been clear that he thinks AWS can do AI chips, both GPUs and CPUs, at least as well, and possibly better than Nvidia.

But now, with the Vera CPU, which is sold alone and bundled with its Rubin GPU, Huang believes he’s unlocked “a major new growth driver” for his company because Vera is, he believes, “the world’s first CPU, purpose-built for agentic AI,” Huang said on the call.

“Vera opens a brand new $200 billion TAM for Nvidia, a market we have never addressed before, and every major hyperscaler and system maker is partnering with us to deploy it. The world is rebuilding computing for agentic AI and robotic physical AI. Nvidia sits at the center of these transitions,” hype man Huang said.

He explained that while the “thinking” part of an AI model uses GPUs, agents mostly run on CPUs. They use CPUs to do their assigned tasks and will, he predicts, run their own form of CPU-driven PCs.

Vera is for agents because it’s specifically designed to process tokens as fast as possible. This is opposed to classic cloud architecture CPUs designed with “cores,” or the ability to run multiple instances of apps as fast as possible.

That sounds logical, but with the major cloud providers as well as startups pursuing AI chip development, what makes him think that Nvidia will be the go-to source for agentic CPUs?

Because, Huang says, Nvidia has already sold $20 billion worth of standalone Vera CPUs this year and we’re only at the beginning.

“The world has a billion users, human users. My sense is that the world is going to have billions of agents, not today. I mean, we’re going to grow into it, but we’ll have billions of agents, and those billions of agents will all use tools. And those tools are going to be like PCs, just like us humans using using PCs today,” he said.

“We’re going to need a lot more CPUs,” he explained.