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Amazon seeks to offload $8B of Nvidia chips to investors

80 points · 92 comments · wslh

  1. vel0city · · 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. otherme123 · · focus · HN ↗
      > 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.

      Bought, yes. Installed and in use? We don't know, but probably on a warehouse waiting for a place to be installed, for an energy source to be build.

      Put the GPUs in another business, sell it to investors, and watch it unfold.

      1. jsnell · · focus · HN ↗
        We do in fact know:

        > The chips in the proposed deal were bought or leased by Amazon. They are installed in more than a dozen US data centres across five states, including Nevada and Virginia, the report said.

        The "warehouses full of GPUs" thing might be the most absurd of the AI economy conspiracy theories.

        1. cmiles8 · · focus · HN ↗
          Actually no, the hyperscalers have been saying this themselves. They have bought chips they can’t power on and use because of issues getting enough power and building out data centers. How much of NVidia’s revenue is actually just selling chips that go sit on a shelf somewhere is a closely guarded secret at this point.
          1. jsnell · · focus · HN ↗
            If that were the case, the hyperscalers would be ramping down capex, not increasing it.

            The not-in-service numbers on the financials are just the normal lag, and have been stable in proportion to capex for years, to well before the start of the boom.

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