Amazon is exploring a transaction involving roughly $8 billion in Nvidia semiconductors that would place chip-related borrowing outside its balance sheet, the Financial Times reported Friday. The proposed arrangement would bring in outside capital while allowing Amazon to continue using the equipment under leases.
The financing proposal follows discussions over recent weeks in which Amazon tested investor appetite. Thousands of Nvidia Grace Blackwell processors would be transferred to a special purpose vehicle, which would raise funds by selling debt to outside investors. Amazon would subsequently rent the processors from that entity, reducing the expensive semiconductor assets carried on its own books.
The FT also reported that Amazon plans to make an equity interest of as much as 10% in the vehicle available to investors. Its account indicated that Amazon itself would retain no ownership interest in the entity.
The effort reflects a wider search among major U.S. cloud infrastructure companies for ways to fund extensive data center construction without loading as much financing onto their balance sheets. Advanced processors for AI model training represent a substantial share of those facilities’ costs.
The central financing objective is to keep debt associated with the chips off Amazon’s balance sheet, said the report. That structure would also make it more difficult for outside observers to assess the amount of risk Amazon has taken on.
According to FT, the equipment covered by the transaction has either been bought or leased by Amazon. It is operating at more than 12 data centers across five states, among them Virginia and Nevada.
Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell is its current advanced offering, with Vera Rubin set to follow. Developers including Anthropic and OpenAI rely on the newest processors to train models, whereas older chips remain in service to run applications.
