(Oct 31): Amazon.com Inc has set up supplier financing arrangements to borrow as much as US$80 billion (RM325 billion) against the value of hardware it buys, the company’s latest move to preserve financial flexibility as it spends hundreds of billions on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.

Amazon has so far funded data centre construction and purchases of chips with the cash from its cloud-computing and retail operations, and with its biggest-ever corporate bond sales.

But it had largely avoided the sort of creative funding arrangements used by some of its rivals, including deals with investment groups to jointly finance data centre construction or to lease chips purchased by other entities. Many of those deals have focused on the Nvidia Corp chips that power most AI work and are often the single most expensive component of new data centre construction. 

The secured loan facility, which Amazon disclosed in a quarterly filing after reporting earnings on Thursday, can be tapped at the company’s discretion from the beginning of 2027 through the third quarter of 2028. Lenders will get collateral rights over some of the assets purchased in connection with the facility. Amazon’s filing doesn’t specify what those assets included, and a spokesperson declined to comment. 

“When we see such a really large opportunity in front of us, we are looking for ways to also responsibly fund that so that we can go as big as possible for our customers,” Amazon Web Services chief executive officer Matt Garman said in an interview on Bloomberg Television on Friday. Amazon, he said, was working with partners to “figure out how we can balance some of those cash flows as we’re really ramping up aggressively”. 

On Thursday, Amazon reported a larger-than-expected increase in capital spending in its third-quarter earnings. The outlays led to a free cash outflow of US$42.4 billion during the year ended Sept 30. The shares were down about 2% at midday in New York.

Amazon’s total spending commitments — including debt and interest, leases not yet commenced, obligations to acquire property and equipment and other line items — ballooned to US$883 billion at the end of September, up 36% from three months earlier and more than double where that figure stood at the same point in 2025. 

Uploaded by Tham Yek Lee