Amazon is acquiring Nvidia AI server racks faster than some of its data centers can power and install them, according to a Business Insider report citing internal emails, as the company makes aggressive financial and hardware bets to compete in artificial intelligence.
The report says Amazon is taking in billions of dollars’ worth of Nvidia racks every month even though some sites are not ready for them and there is no electricity yet to feed the AI accelerators. Through a process called Early Rack Receipt, AWS expected to take around $5 billion worth of Nvidia GB300 server racks in August alone, with roughly $3 billion more expected every month for the foreseeable future. The servers, described as built for the age of AI reasoning, are being acquired before the final deployment phase.
Some AWS sites in the U.S. lack the power to run new servers. The hardware is stored in warehouses until the data centers are done. One Amazon team wrote internally that it had no clear forecast for installing the GPUs arriving each month.
The big cloud companies have been buying GPUs as fast as they can find them. Many of those chips now sit dark, unplugged from any workload, while everyone else in the industry waits for whatever is left. The report has a name for it: “dark GPUs.”
All of this is also costing Amazon a lot. Its trailing free cash flow dipped below zero in the second quarter for the first time since 2023, and it doesn’t expect that to change anytime soon. It’s planning to spend around $220 billion this year, which, per the report, is more than any other hyperscaler is shelling out on AI and data centers.
Amazon has changed how it buys things, too. Back before the AI frenzy, AWS didn’t own a rack until it was built and sitting in a data center. These days, the company Jeff Bezos started will put down billions early just to get its hands on more AI racks sooner.
An Amazon spokesperson defended the practice, according to the report, describing the storage of finished racks in warehouses as “best business practice.” The company expects to see significant financial returns from the large AI infrastructure investment eventually, saying AI is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that no IT company can afford to miss. CEO Andy Jassy has said AWS has dealt with something similar in the past.
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