Thread

1. vel0city · 1790952829 · focus · HN ↗

   I'm just trying to understand this more, can someone please give more insight?

   So Amazon bought a bunch of nVidia hardware, and has been installing it in their datacenters. These are supposedly in-service for Amazon customers, a lot of it available and in-use today.

   This is creating a SPV company, have that SPV take out loans, have the SPV buy the hardware still installed in Amazon's datacenters, and then Amazon rents the hardware they previously bought and installed from the SPV?

   This sounds like an expensive shell game paying expensive finance bros to make some numbers on papers look a little different. What do they really gain from this? Is this just because Amazon wants ~$8B in cash today, like taking a cash-out refinancing on your home? Doesn't Amazon have over a hundred billion dollars in cash on hand? If you've got a pile of money in your house sitting around, why would you do a cash-out refinancing at a time of high interest rates?

   1. jmyeet · 1790953461 · focus · HN ↗

      What they gain is financial insulation. The SPV owns the hardware. It doesn't even own the physical building. These companies have managed to raise debt secured only by the GPUs. So, if/when this all goes south, the investors can only make a claim against the GPUs. Not the physical building and certainly not Amazon itself. That's what's going on here.

      This is also why SPVs are off balance sheet because they aren't really a liability to Amazon (or Google or Microsoft).

      The shocking part is that investors are taking on this risk to buy GPUs that depreciate wildly and fail at an annual rate of (supposedly) ~9% for a 7-8% return.

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