Amazon sells its chips and rents them back: selling an asset and leasing it back is debt under another name, and in an SME's accounts it weighs on the margin
3 October 2026, 09:54
According to the Financial Times, Amazon is in talks with investors to move around $8 billion of Nvidia chips, already installed in more than a dozen data centres in the United States, into a company set up for the purpose. That company would buy them, raising the money partly through debt, outside investors could take a stake of up to 10 per cent, and Amazon would rent the chips back. The chips stay where they are and keep working; the owner changes.
The reason lies in the scale of the investment: this year Amazon expects to spend more than $200 billion, mostly on chips and data centres. Taking part of those assets off its own balance sheet leaves room to buy more.
The transaction has a technical name, sale and leaseback, and Amazon did not invent it: airlines have long sold aircraft to investors and leased them back, and property companies do the same with buildings. In Italy companies use it too, with property and machinery: the asset is sold to a leasing company, the price is collected, lease payments are made for a few years and at the end the asset is bought back.
Selling and leasing back is a loan under another name
To understand what happens, just follow the cash. Today the sale price comes in. Then, every month, a lease payment goes out that repays that price plus interest, and at the end a buy-back price is paid to become the owner again. It is the same design as a mortgage: money now, instalments later. The difference is that what secures the lender is not a mortgage on the plant: it is the plant itself, which in the meantime belongs to someone else.
This does not make the transaction wrong. A company that has a building already paid for and needs cash for a new investment may find a sale and leaseback quicker than a bank loan. But it must be assessed for what it is, a debt, with the question asked of any loan: will the business generate the money to pay the instalments?
The length of the contract is measured against the life of the asset
The weak point of Amazon's deal, as observers note, is how fast those chips lose value: a more powerful generation comes out roughly every year. A building lasts for decades; a cutting-edge chip risks being overtaken before it has finished paying for itself.
For an Italian company the principle is identical. A CNC machining centre, a painting line, a piece of management software: each has an economic life, which is the time during which it really produces, not the one written in the depreciation tables. If the contract lasts longer than that life, in the last stretch the company is paying rent on a machine that no longer earns its keep, or that has already had to be replaced. And the new one has to be financed while the old one is still being paid for.
The same applies the other way round: a building sold on a short contract is bought back soon, and the instalments weigh heavily on a few years.
In the statutory accounts the lease payment sits above EBITDA
Then there is an effect that is hard to spot in an SME's accounts, and that lenders spot at once. Companies that prepare their accounts under Italian accounting standards record leasing with the so-called equity method: the asset leaves fixed assets, and the lease payments, capital and interest together, go into the costs for the use of third-party assets.
In plain terms: as long as the plant was owned, its wear passed through depreciation, which sits below EBITDA, that is, the margin before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation. After the sale and leaseback the whole lease payment sits above it, and EBITDA falls even though nothing has changed on the factory floor: same machine, same parts, same customers.
The gain on the sale, on the other hand, does not arrive all at once: Article 2425-bis of the Italian Civil Code requires the capital gain to be spread over the years of the contract.
And the debt does not appear among the liabilities on the balance sheet, but it does not disappear. Leasing companies report their receivables to the Bank of Italy's Central Credit Register, and whoever examines a request for a credit line finds them there. A transaction designed to lighten the balance sheet, if nobody explains it beforehand, reaches the bank as a falling margin and a debt that on paper could not be seen. A bank does not trust perfect accounts but consistent ones, and here consistency lies entirely in the explanation: why the asset was sold, what was bought with that cash, how much it earns.
Amazon discusses these matters with investment funds. An SME discusses them with its bank branch manager. The question, in both cases, is the same: how much will the cash coming in today cost tomorrow, and for how many years after the machine has stopped being useful.
This article was prompted by a news item published in Financial Times on 1 October 2026.