Nvidia, the company powering essentially the entire AI boom, is now looking to rent back its own chips. According to The Information, Nvidia has now signed a deal with Lambda, a cloud service provider in which it has already invested, to lease back some of its own GPUs over a period of time.
The details of the purported agreement are unclear, but reports suggest a four-year lease for 10,000 GPUs, valued at approximately $1.3 billion, followed by a separate $200 million deal for an additional 8,000 (likely lower-end/older) chips. These are Nvidia GPU servers that Lambda once bought from the company, and now the chipmaker wants to rent these back. This contract will make Nvidia, by far, the biggest client under Lambda's belt.
Lambda, for those unaware, is a cloud startup that opened its doors in 2012. It rents out AI server capacity to companies like Microsoft and Amazon, but is also in line to serve Google, OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic.
Interestingly, these leased GPU servers will reportedly be used in-house by Nvidia's researchers, much like Amazon and Microsoft use Lambda's services. Both companies are hyperscalers themselves, but they mainly utilize Lambda's servers for internal purposes rather than subletting them through AWS or Azure platforms, respectively.
For Nvidia, this is nothing unusual as it's predictably biased toward companies that use its products. CoreWeave, another AI startup, was majorly aided by Nvidia with multiple investment rounds and a very similar GPU-renting deal. CoreWeave even sought a $2.3 billion loan using its H100 GPUs reserve as collateral back in 2023.
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