GPUs’ Latest Magic Act: Securing Data Center Debt; Amazon’s Doubling Down on AI Chips

While Nvidia makes bank from selling artificial intelligence chips at $32,000 a pop, several upstart cloud providers—as well as the big guns like Amazon Web Services—are buying as many chips as they can so they can rent them out to AI developers. These cloud providers hope to generate revenue of at least several times that sticker price for each chip. Will that gamble pay off?

That’s the question in our mind as we hear that Crusoe Energy, a former crypto miner that now rents servers to AI developers, raised $200 million of debt primarily to buy Nvidia's H100 AI chips, which are the most advanced on the market. The chips, notably, will be the collateral for the loan. In the coming months, Crusoe plans to have around 20,000 H100s available for customers, according to chief executive officer Chase Lochmiller. AWS, the biggest cloud firm, says it offers H100 clusters that scale up to 20,000 GPUs for an individual customer.

We don’t know all the terms of the debt deal, which Crusoe just struck with Upper90, an investment firm that previously gave Crusoe debt financing. That time, Crusoe used the company's clean-energy generators for its data centers as collateral.