Amazon could sell and rent back $8bn of Nvidia chips

Amazon has held talks with investors on selling about $8 billion of Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips to a special-purpose vehicle and then leasing them back, the Financial Times reported on 2 October 2026. The vehicle would raise money from outside investors by issuing debt, and Amazon plans to offer an equity stake of up to 10% in it, the FT said.

Amazon and Nvidia did not immediately respond to Reuters for comment. The chips were bought or leased by Amazon and are installed in more than a dozen US data centres across five states, including Nevada and Virginia, according to the report. Amazon expects to spend about $220 billion on capital projects this year.

How would the sale and leaseback work?

A special-purpose vehicle would buy the chips from Amazon with money borrowed from outside investors, and Amazon would then lease them back, the FT reported on 2 October 2026. Amazon has held talks with investors in recent weeks to gauge interest in a deal that would move thousands of Grace Blackwell chips it is installing in US data centres into the vehicle, Reuters said, citing the FT.

In a sale and leaseback, the seller turns an asset into cash and pays rent to keep using it. Amazon could take a more asset-light approach to its balance sheet by passing the expensive chips to investors, the FT said.

Grace Blackwell is Nvidia’s design that pairs two Blackwell GPUs with one Grace CPU on a single module. AWS, Amazon’s cloud arm, rents systems built from it to customers as EC2 P6e UltraServers, with up to 72 Blackwell GPUs in one NVLink domain on the GB200 version, according to AWS.

Amazon expects to spend about $220 billion this year

Amazon expects to spend about $220 billion on capital projects in 2026, chief executive Andy Jassy told investors on 30 July, up from an earlier estimate of $200 billion because memory costs more, Fortune reported. Jassy said demand would still outrun the capacity Amazon can add this year, and expected the same in 2027. AWS remains on pace to double its power capacity by the end of 2027 compared with 2025, he said. AWS, the business that rents out the computing, grew sales 37% to $42.2 billion in the second quarter, with operating income of $16.6 billion, and its AI business passed an annual revenue run rate of $25 billion, Amazon said.

The spending has pushed Amazon’s free cash flow below zero. In the twelve months to 30 June 2026 its operations brought in $161.4 billion and it spent $169.0 billion on property and equipment, after proceeds from sales and incentives, leaving an outflow of $7.6 billion, its second-quarter results show. Amazon says the $66.1 billion rise in that spending over the year primarily reflects investment in artificial intelligence. Cash capital expenditure in the first half of 2026 was $96.3 billion, against $55.6 billion a year earlier, its quarterly filing shows.

Amazon’s long-term debt nearly doubled in six months

Amazon’s long-term debt rose from $68.8 billion at the end of 2025 to $133.0 billion on 30 June 2026, at face value, its quarterly filing shows. Amazon sold notes in dollars, euros, Swiss francs and Canadian dollars in the first half, including $37.0 billion of dollar notes in March, and agreed a $17.5 billion delayed-draw term loan in June, undrawn at 30 June.

Amazon has kept borrowing since. It sold $25.0 billion of dollar notes on 9 July and £4.25 billion of sterling notes on 14 September, about $5.63 billion at the Federal Reserve’s H.10 rate of $1.3250 to the pound for 25 September 2026. The vehicle the FT describes would carry its own debt, raised from outside investors.

Who else rents AI hardware from investors?

xAI does: in January 2026 Apollo led a $3.5 billion financing for Valor Compute Infrastructure, a fund managed by Valor Equity Partners that acquires Nvidia GB200 chips and leases them to a subsidiary of Elon Musk’s xAI. The money supports the fund’s $5.4 billion acquisition and lease of computing equipment on a triple net lease, and Nvidia invested in the fund as an anchor limited partner, Apollo said. Musk put xAI’s Colossus 2 supercomputer at 550,000 Nvidia chips on 25 September.

Meta has used a venture for a whole campus. Funds managed by Blue Owl Capital own 80% of the venture developing Meta’s Hyperion data-centre campus in Louisiana, with Meta keeping 20% and receiving a one-time distribution of about $3 billion, Meta said on 21 October 2025. Meta’s leases on the campus start in 2029, it keeps the venture off its consolidated accounts, and its maximum exposure to loss was $46.03 billion on 30 June 2026, its quarterly filing shows.

Chipmakers are putting money into their buyers too: AMD agreed on 22 July 2026 to make an equity investment of up to $5 billion in Anthropic, which will deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD chips.

AWS rents Grace Blackwell systems out by the hour

AWS sells time on Grace Blackwell hardware through its EC2 P6e UltraServers, built on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 and GB300 NVL72 systems, its product page shows. On 2 October 2026 AWS’s price list quoted $761.904 an hour, or $10.582 per accelerator, for a 72-GPU P6e-GB200 UltraServer reserved through EC2 Capacity Blocks in its Dallas Local Zone.