Catenaa, Friday, October 02, 2026- Amazon is looking to offload about $8 billion of Nvidia chips to external investors to strengthen its balance sheet.
The Financial Times reported that Amazon has held talks with investors in recent weeks to gauge interest in the deal, which would allow the company to spin off thousands of Grace Blackwell chips it is deploying in data centers across the US into a special-purpose vehicle.
Following the news report, Amazon stock rose by 2%, and Nvidia stock rose by 2% when the market opened on Friday.
Sources familiar with the matter have told The Financial Times that Amazon would then lease the advanced AI chips back from the SPV, tapping outside investors through debt issuance. By unloading the expensive semiconductors to investors, the company could adopt a more asset-light balance sheet.
The proposed move comes as tech giants seek creative ways to finance massive spending on data center infrastructure. Much of the cost of building these facilities is tied to the chips used to train advanced AI models, the report said.
FT said tech companies are pursuing various strategies to preserve their credit score by clearing debt from their balance sheets.
“They have used residual value guarantees, providing lenders with assurances about the future value of chips or data centers, without borrowing cash to finance projects themselves,” the report added.
Sources said that Amazon plans to offer an equity stake of up to 10% in the vehicle, meaning that it will not own any stakes in the entity. Discussions between Amazon and investors are ongoing and are subject to change.
“Amazon bought or leased the chips involved in the proposed deal, and they have been deployed in more than a dozen US data centers across five states, including Nevada and Virginia,” the people added.
Amazon has committed to invest about $83 billion in OpenAI and Anthropic, which use Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell chips to train their models.
Amazon expects each series of semiconductors to last at least five years, according to regulatory filings.
Amazon is expected to spend $220 billion in capital expenditure this year, most of which will go to its cloud unit, AWS, to buy advanced chips and expand AI data centers.
The FT reported that the company has tapped the market to help fund this investment, and in March it laid out plans to raise about $50 billion through corporate bond issuances, up from $37 billion after strong demand.
But it faced weakening interest in long-dated debt when it sold $25 billion in bonds in July, with investors demanding higher yields.
This funding method is becoming increasingly popular on Wall Street, where companies use their ready access to chips to borrow funds.
In August, Nvidia offered to backstop up to $125 billion of such debt through a $500 billion financing platform with major Wall Street groups.
