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Amazon Wants to Move $8 Billion in Nvidia Chips Off Its Books. Is AI’s Financing Model Starting to Change?

Amazon is quietly restructuring who actually owns the AI hardware powering its data centers, and the investors taking the other side of that deal may not realize what depreciates fastest in Silicon Valley.

By Rich Duprey
Published October 4, 2026, 11:38am ET · 3 min read

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A middle-aged man with gray hair and glasses, wearing a light green t-shirt, sits at a light wooden table. He has his hand on his chin and is intently looking at a black tablet. The tablet displays a financial chart with red and blue lines and a partial headline that reads 'Amazon for Amazon and NVIDIA'. A two-toned coffee mug sits to the right of the tablet. In the background, a large window shows a blurred view of a green suburban street, and white kitchen cabinets are visible.
A thoughtful investor examines market data and headlines about Amazon and Nvidia's growth, reflecting on the potential shifts in AI's financing landscape. © 24/7 Wall St.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) is in talks to move $8 billion of NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) Grace Blackwell chips into a special purpose vehicle, the Financial Times reported. The vehicle would sell debt to outside investors, buy the chips, and lease them back to Amazon. The hardware stays where it is. It is already installed in data centers across at least five states, and Amazon would keep up to 10% of the equity.

Amazon spent $54.2 billion on capital projects in the second quarter, 68% more than a year earlier. Andy Jassy committed to roughly $200 billion in spending for 2026. Free cash flow over the past 12 months turned negative at -$7.6 billion. Long-term debt rose to $119.1 billion from $65.6 billion a year earlier. A leaseback lets Amazon keep running the chips while protecting its credit rating and moving the obligation into lease disclosures.

AMZN price target

Investors Would Own Tech’s Fastest-Aging Asset

The deal is smart for Amazon and weak for whoever buys the debt. Airlines do sale-leasebacks on planes that fly for decades. Grace Blackwell is already one generation behind Vera Rubin. NVIDIA says Vera Rubin delivers 35X lower token costs than Grace Blackwell Ultra. NVIDIA estimates about $25 billion per gigawatt of revenue for Grace Blackwell and roughly $40 billion for Vera Rubin. Each new launch makes the collateral worth less.

On the July earnings call, Jassy said servers take “a little less than three years” to break even and last at least five to six years. Amazon keeps the early, profitable years. Lenders are left with later years, when a chip two generations old must be refinanced or resold.

NVIDIA Is Building Similar Financing Structures

NVIDIA is building similar structures. NVIDIA reported $279 billion in supply commitments and guarantee obligations limited at $108.5 billion for AI cloud and data center partners. It signed up six asset managers and banks to raise more than $500 billion of outside capital for AI infrastructure. Management said: “We know some will call this circular financing.” NVIDIA expects the AI labs it supports to account for roughly a quarter of its business next year.

NVDA price target

Demand for computing power remains intense. NVIDIA says it can supply about 70% of what customers want. Having chips that lose value quickly carries risk. Amazon is choosing cash over hardware ownership. Buyers want what the chips produce and are passing on the risk of having them to someone else.

What to Watch in Amazon’s Next Two Earnings Reports

Three signals will show whether this becomes the template. First, whether Amazon’s third-quarter earnings report reveals the vehicle and how much its lease obligations grow. Amazon has guided to $22.5 billion to $26.5 billion in operating income for the quarter. Second, the interest rate investors demand on the debt.

A wide spread would mean lenders are pricing in an aging risk that stock investors have ignored. Third, whether other cloud giants announce similar deals within two quarters. Should they do so, more of AI’s hardware bill will sit off the balance sheets investors read, and lenders will be left holding chips that NVIDIA is working to make obsolete.

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Rich Duprey

After two decades of patrolling the dark corners of suburbia as a police officer, Rich Duprey hung up his badge and gun to begin writing full time about stocks and investing. For the past 20 years, he’s been cruising the markets looking for companies to lock up as long-term holdings in a portfolio while writing extensively on the broad sectors of consumer goods, technology, and industrials. Because his experience isn’t from the typical financial analyst track, Rich is able to break down complex topics into understandable and useful action points for the average investor. His writings have appeared on The Motley Fool, InvestorPlace, Yahoo! Finance, Money Morning, and, of course, 24/7 Wall St. He has been featured in both U.S. and international publications, including MarketWatch, Financial Times, Forbes, Fast Company, and USA Today.

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