Amazon Taps External Investors for $8 Billion Nvidia Chip Bill

Amazon is seeking to offload around $8 billion worth of advanced Nvidia chips to external investors, in a move aimed at strengthening its balance sheet and adopting a more asset-light approach.

The e-commerce giant plans to spin off thousands of Grace Blackwell chips into a special purpose vehicle, which it will then lease back from the entity. This will allow Amazon to tap outside investors through debt issuance, rather than shouldering the expensive chip costs itself.

Amazon held talks with investors in recent weeks to gauge interest in the deal, and plans to offer an equity stake of up to 10% in the vehicle. This indicates that the company will not hold any stake in the entity.

The move comes amid a broader push by US hyperscalers to seek less balance sheet-heavy means to finance their massive data center buildout. A bulk of data center costs come from the advanced chips used to train artificial intelligence models, with Amazon itself planning to spend over $200 billion in capital expenditure this year on its Web Services cloud unit.