Amazon is seeking to offload approximately $8 billion worth of Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips to investors through a special-purpose vehicle to strengthen its balance sheet. The company would lease the chips back from the SPV, which would fund the deal through debt issuance and offer investors up to 10% equity stake. The chips are currently installed across more than a dozen US data centres.
San Francisco semiconductor startup Volantis raised $88 million to develop laser-based technology connecting AI chips to memory, potentially enabling 220 memory chips per GPU compared to current limits of 8. The company uses VCSELs, tiny lasers already found in iPhones, to eliminate bandwidth constraints and plans to deliver chips next year for AI applications.
Nvidia's $500 billion financing plan using AI chips as collateral faces skepticism from Wall Street banks and investors who question the long-term value of the hardware and want stronger guarantees than originally proposed. The disagreement highlights broader concerns about the sustainability of AI infrastructure investments and financing structures reminiscent of past market bubbles.
Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to finance infrastructure spending, including chip leasing and equipment, as revealed in Anthropic's IPO filing. The relationship spans compute supply, equipment leasing, and financing, positioning Broadcom centrally in Anthropic's infrastructure buildout and making Anthropic potentially Broadcom's largest customer by 2027. The arrangement exemplifies reciprocal spending dynamics in AI infrastructure financing, though Anthropic disclosed potential conflicts of interest around hardware access and pricing.
Synopsys and Amazon Web Services signed a multi-year licensing deal worth over $1 billion for chip design intellectual property. Synopsys provides software and blueprints for designing computer chips, competing with Arm Holdings in the licensing business. As part of the agreement, Synopsys will also adopt AWS computing services and Amazon Bedrock for AI applications.