Amazon is reportedly taking early delivery of about $5 billion in Nvidia AI racks, but power shortages leave some sites unable to run them

Amazon Web Services has started taking ownership of Nvidia AI server racks earlier than it used to, and some of that hardware is reportedly waiting for power. Business Insider reported on October 20, citing internal Amazon emails, that AWS expected to receive about $5 billion worth of Nvidia GB300 racks in August under a new process called Early Rack Receipt, with roughly $3 billion more each month.

Under the old approach, AWS took ownership of finished racks when they arrived at the data center. Under the new one, it receives them before they reach their final installation site. According to the report, some US sites that were meant to host the racks had room for them but had not secured the electricity needed to run them, so some equipment sat in warehouses. Amazon described staging hardware near deployment sites as a best practice.

The report sits awkwardly next to what CEO Andy Jassy told investors on Amazon's July 30 call: that the company buys servers "a few months before putting them into service" so it has strong visibility into demand before it spends. Amazon's filings also show trailing twelve month free cash flow turning to an outflow of $7.6 billion and more than $137.2 billion in signed leases that had not yet started as of the end of June 2026. The report itself is secondhand, and Amazon has not confirmed the idle hardware figures.

Why it matters for builders: power, not chips, is increasingly the limit on how much AI capacity the big clouds can switch on. That feeds directly into GPU availability, reserved capacity pricing and how long you wait for new instance types in a given region. It also follows Jassy's own comments that AWS capacity is largely sold out through 2027.

What's next: Amazon reports third quarter results on Thursday, October 29, its first chance to say how much of this capacity is actually coming online and what its spending plans look like for next year.

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