AMD's AI chips will be used as debt collateral in a deal to financially support a cloud startup buying the company's processors, The Information reports. It's the first known occurrence of the practice with AMD's chips, creating a circular deal similar to those that Nvidia has been making to increase GPU sales.
The $300 million loan from Goldman Sachs to the cloud startup Crusoe will be used to buy AMD's AI chips (the reporting doesn't specify which chip will be used, though presumably it will be a member of the Instinct MI450 series). Those chips will be used in a datacenter in Ohio.
AMD is set to effectively serve as guarantor for the deal, according to the report, by agreeing to rent the chips from Crusoe if the company can't find other willing customers, sources close to the deal told The Information. In the meantime, AMD will get to say it has $300 million in AI chip sales.
Crusoe is a cloud startup that claims to build data centers with cleaner energy than other companies, with more due diligence on "sites with clean, scalable power already in place."
This is far from AMD's first major AI deal. Last year, OpenAI secured up to 6 gigawatts of AMD GPU compute in a deal that could see the ChatGPT creator take a significant stake in AMD. In December, AMD and HPE entered into an agreement that will bring the AMD Helios rack-scale AI architecture into HPE’s product portfolio.
AMD is following Nvidia in using chips as collateral. Nvidia famously put up H100 GPUs as collateral to back CoreWeave's $2.3 billion loan by Magnetar Capital and Blackstone. These circular deals let the companies make big claims about how many chips they've sold and where they're deployed without startups seeing much of the actual risk.
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