Amazon is working on a financing structure that would place roughly $8B of its AI accelerators inside a special purpose vehicle, according to the Financial Times, then rent the hardware back.
Under the plan, that vehicle issues debt and gives outside investors a 10% equity stake, with Amazon understood to have held talks with potential backers over recent weeks. The hardware is believed to be Grace Blackwell accelerators – two Nvidia Blackwell GPUs and a Grace CPU apiece – spread across five of the company’s data centers. Some are owned outright; others are already on lease.
Valuing a Grace Blackwell unit at $60,000 to $70,000 points to roughly 114,000 to 133,000 chips changing hands. Amazon agreed in August to buy two million more Nvidia GPUs through 2028.
The mechanics matter more than the hardware. Pushing the chips into an SPV strips both the assets and the vehicle’s debt from Amazon’s balance sheet, flattering its debt-to-equity ratio and credit profile at a moment when AI infrastructure spending is drawing scrutiny.
The manoeuvre is part of a wider pattern. Reporting by the Wall Street Journal puts off-balance-sheet obligations across Amazon, Google and seven other giants at about $3T, much of it AI-related. Meta, for its part, has offloaded an 80% stake in its Hyperion campus and – the New York Times reported – booked billions in innovation tax credits by classing its AI data centers as experiments.
