Amazon Stockpiles Billions in Idle Nvidia GB300 AI Servers

Amazon Web Services is sitting on billions of dollars of Nvidia hardware it cannot yet switch on. Internal AWS emails show that some of its US data centers do not have enough electricity to host new Nvidia GB300 server racks, so the machines wait in intermediate warehouses until construction work is finished.

According to the emails, AWS expected roughly $5 billion worth of GB300 racks in August alone, followed by about $3 billion more every month. That pace works out to around $36 billion over a year. One Amazon team complained in the messages that it had no clear forecast for when all those GPUs would actually be installed in servers.

A change in how AWS buys hardware

The GB300 is a complete rack sold by Nvidia and packed with the GPUs that run AI models. Before the AI boom, AWS only took ownership of a rack once it was finished and delivered to a data center. Today the company pays billions in advance to secure hardware earlier.

The situation is part of a wider phenomenon dubbed "dark GPUs": chips that sit powered off for lack of electricity. Cloud giants buy as much hardware as they can, leaving the rest of the industry with what is left. Power is not the only bottleneck, either. Even if the grid connection arrived tomorrow, a data center still needs concrete, steel, copper cabling, electricians and technicians. Such buildings often take several years to complete, which Amazon could have anticipated when it placed its orders.

Amazon sees no problem

An Amazon spokesperson described storing finished racks in warehouses as a "best business practice". CEO Andy Jassy has pointed out that AWS has faced a comparable situation before. The company is betting on large financial returns, convinced that AI is a once-in-a-generation opportunity no tech player can afford to miss.

The cost is already visible in the accounts. Amazon's free cash flow turned negative on a trailing twelve-month basis in the second quarter, the first time since 2023. The group plans about $220 billion in capital expenditure this year and expects free cash flow to stay negative for some time.