Amazon seeks to shift $8B of Nvidia chips to investors, FT says.

Amazon is seeking to move about $8 billion of Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips into a special-purpose vehicle and lease them back, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. The talks are ongoing and could change. No deal has been announced.

The Seattle-based company has spent recent weeks sounding out investors on a structure that would spin thousands of those chips, which it is deploying in U.S. data centers, into the vehicle, the FT said. The vehicle would borrow from outside investors. Amazon would then lease the chips back. The paper said that would let Amazon take a more asset-light approach to hardware that is expensive to hold on its own books.

The chips in the proposed deal were bought or leased by Amazon, the FT’s sources said, and have been deployed in more than a dozen U.S. data centers across five states, including Nevada and Virginia. The other three states were not named. The same account also describes the chips as ones Amazon is still deploying, so this is not a clean story of a fleet that is already finished and sitting idle.

Amazon plans to offer an equity stake of up to 10 percent in the vehicle, which the FT said means the company would not own any stake in the entity. No investor was named. People familiar with the talks told the paper they expect the vehicle to get an investment-grade rating tied to Amazon’s double-A standing, which could open it to insurers and pension funds. That is an expectation, not a commitment.

Amazon declined to comment to the Financial Times. Reuters, relaying the report, said Amazon and Nvidia did not immediately respond to questions outside regular business hours. Nvidia is the chip supplier in this account. It is not described as a party to the vehicle.

Grace Blackwell is Nvidia’s current top-end AI platform in the FT’s telling, and the paper noted it will soon be superseded by Vera Rubin. The articles do not name a specific board, such as GB200. They also do not call the structure a completed sale-leaseback. What they describe is a proposed offload into a vehicle, then a leaseback, still in talks.

Separate figures in the same FT story are context, not the size of this deal. Amazon is expected to spend $220 billion on capital expenditure this year, most of it at AWS on chips and AI data centers. The company raised bond plans this year and met weaker demand for long-dated debt in July. Amazon has also committed to invest as much as $83 billion in Anthropic. None of those numbers is the vehicle.

The FT closed by noting a different, already reported pattern: GPU-backed borrowing at firms such as CoreWeave, and Nvidia’s August offer to backstop up to $125 billion of that kind of debt through a $500 billion financing platform with Wall Street. That is Nvidia standing behind other people’s chip debt. It is not this Amazon vehicle.

Stakes: If the talks close, Amazon would be financing a slice of its AI buildout by parking Grace Blackwell systems with outside investors and renting them back, instead of carrying all of that hardware itself. As of Friday, the public record is anonymous sourcing in the Financial Times, relayed by Reuters, and a company that declined to comment. Nothing has been signed.