Amazon.com Inc. is seeking to offload about $8 billion worth of advanced NVIDIA artificial intelligence (AI) chips to outside investors to strengthen its balance sheet and fund its aggressive AI expansion, according to a Financial Times report.
Under the proposed arrangement, Amazon held talks with investors in recent weeks to gauge interest in transferring thousands of high-performance Grace Blackwell units into a special purpose vehicle (SPV). The e-commerce and cloud computing titan plans to lease the advanced graphics processing units (GPUs) currently deployed across its U.S. data centers back from the entity. To finance the purchase, the newly created vehicle will raise capital from outside investors through debt issuance and offer up to a 10% equity stake, leaving Amazon with no equity ownership in the SPV.
The novel financial structure reflects a broader push among major tech hyperscalers to adopt asset-light strategies amid soaring capital requirements.
Tech companies are heavily investing in data center expansion, with most of the expenditure driven by the exorbitant cost of specialized chips required to train and run complex AI models. Amazon alone projects spending over $200 billion in total capital expenditures this year, primarily funneling resources into its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform to procure chips and build facilities.
By shifting the $8 billion in hardware off its balance sheet, Amazon retains operational control and seamless access to critical processing power while transferring the capital burden and risk of hardware depreciation to external investors. The rapid pace of hardware innovation makes chip residual values a central debate in AI infrastructure, as rapid technological shifts can accelerate depreciation.
Stephen Sopko, an analyst who cover semiconductor and deep tech at HyperFRAME Research, said Amazon’s situation is comparable to CoreWeave Inc., which has used NVIDIA hardware as collateral since its first H100-backed financing in 2023.
“It is the same underlying asset, but not the same instrument,” Sopko said. “CoreWeave was an AI cloud borrowing to fund continued deployment. Here the rumored off taker is Amazon, and the hardware is already running.”
“Circular financing is the right question when NVIDIA is simultaneously the vendor, equity holder, off taker and financial backstop,” Sopko added. “That is not the structure being reported here. The offtaker would be Amazon. The credit case would primarily be Amazon’s lease obligation, not a bet on the residual value of the chip.”
Amazon’s effort highlights a burgeoning industry trend toward creative asset-backed financing tailored specifically to GPU computing power.
Last year, London-based Nuway Capital pioneered GPU-backed bonds to generate infrastructure capital, paying out bondholders using revenues reinvested from chip operations. Furthermore, Nvidia itself expanded into GPU financing earlier this year by partnering with private equity firms Blackstone, Apollo, and KKR to establish an asset-backed financing ecosystem.
As hyper-scale tech firms contend with unprecedented capital spending to power the ongoing AI boom, structured financial vehicles like Amazon’s proposed deal demonstrate how Wall Street and Silicon Valley are increasingly converging to fund the next generation of digital infrastructure.
