Nvidia racks pile up in Amazon warehouses as power grid lags

Amazon Web Services is buying Nvidia hardware faster than it can power it. Through a program it calls “Early Rack Receipt,” the cloud giant is set to take delivery of roughly $5 billion worth of Nvidia GB300 server racks in August 2026 — and some of them are reportedly heading straight into intermediary warehouses instead of live data centers.

The reason isn't a shortage of floor space. According to Crypto Briefing, several AWS sites have room for the racks but not enough electrical capacity to run them, so the hardware waits in interim storage until utility infrastructure catches up. The industry already has a nickname for gear like this: “dark GPUs” — chips that are bought, shipped, stored and never switched on.

The buying isn't slowing down, either. After that first ~$5 billion batch, AWS expects roughly $3 billion in rack deliveries every month going forward. Internal emails reportedly show the procurement blitz was deliberate — a play to lock down scarce AI hardware before rivals could grab it.

The bill is landing on Amazon's books. Capital expenditures for 2026 are projected at about $220 billion, nearly double 2025's level. AWS also posted negative free cash flow of $7.6 billion in its most recent quarter, its first dip into the red on that measure since 2023.

Demand, at least, backs up the ambition: AWS revenue climbed 36.7% year over year in the second quarter. The company also plans to deploy another 2 million Nvidia GPUs between 2027 and 2028, spanning Blackwell Ultra and Rubin models, on top of earlier commitments covering more than 1 million GPUs.

The open question is how much of this hardware sits dark, and for how long. Amazon hasn't said whether any stockpiled racks could land on the secondary market, or when. For Nvidia, though, the near-term signal is loud and clear — a customer signing up for ~$3 billion in monthly rack deliveries is about as strong as demand gets.