Dark AI Clouds: Like any other hyperscaler willing to sacrifice everything to turn AI into a game-changing opportunity, Amazon is pulling some bold stunts with both its finances and its hardware. A new report says the company is buying more GPUs than it has the power to run.
Amazon is allegedly taking in billions of dollars' worth of Nvidia racks every month, even though some sites aren't ready for them and there is no electricity to feed the AI accelerators just yet. According to internal emails seen by Business Insider, Amazon is willing to tie up billions in cash upfront as long as it can secure new hardware capacity early.
The messages describe Amazon's Early Rack Receipt process, through which 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. Amazon is getting servers "built for the age of AI reasoning" before the final deployment phase.
Some US-based AWS facilities don't have enough power to install and turn the servers on, which means the costly hardware is being stored in "intermediary" warehouses until the final data center site is completed. In the emails, one Amazon team lamented that there was no clear forecast for actually installing all the GPUs the company was acquiring each month.
Amazon's lack of energy capacity is part of a growing phenomenon known as "dark GPUs." Data center and cloud giants are piling up all the hardware they can, but much of it is essentially gathering dust on shelves while the rest of the IT industry is left with the scraps.
The dark GPU issue is also adding financial pressure to data center ventures. Amazon's trailing free cash flow turned negative in the second quarter for the first time since 2023, and the company expects it to stay that way for a while, with capital expenditures set to reach around $220 billion this year.
Amazon is spending more than any other hyperscaler to build new AI capabilities and data center capacity, and is changing its usual business practices to do it. Before the AI craze, AWS only took ownership of racks once they were finished and delivered to a data center. Now, the company Jeff Bezos founded is willing to spend billions upfront to secure more AI racks earlier in the supply chain.
An Amazon spokesperson defended the approach, calling the practice of storing finished racks in a warehouse "best business practice." The company expects significant financial returns from this massive AI infrastructure build-up eventually, because AI is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity no IT company can afford to miss. AWS has been through something similar before, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said.