Amazon has held talks with investors about spinning off approximately $8 billion worth of Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips into a special-purpose vehicle, then leasing the hardware back for use in its U.S. data centers3.
The deal structure would move the chips off Amazon's balance sheet while retaining access to the computing power they provide1,2. The Financial Times first reported the talks, and Bloomberg subsequently confirmed the $8 billion figure.
Under the arrangement as described, external investors would take ownership of the Grace Blackwell chips through the newly created SPV, bearing the capital cost of the hardware on their own books. Amazon would then lease the chips back, converting a large upfront capital expenditure into an operating expense spread over the lease term.
ANALYSIS The structure resembles sale-leaseback transactions common in real estate and aviation, applied here to AI accelerators. By offloading ownership, Amazon could free balance-sheet capacity for additional infrastructure spending without proportionally inflating its capital-expenditure line.
The chips involved are Nvidia's Grace Blackwell generation, the company's current flagship AI accelerator line.
ANALYSIS The deal, if completed, would also create a new asset class for institutional investors: direct ownership stakes in deployed AI compute, with Amazon as the lessee. That dynamic could attract infrastructure-focused capital seeking exposure to AI hardware demand without building or operating data centers.
The talks come during a period of heavy AI-infrastructure investment across Amazon's cloud division. AWS recently open-sourced Strands Decider 2B, a decision model for agentic AI pipelines, reflecting continued buildout of its AI software stack alongside hardware expansion[1].