'You've taken us free cash flow negative as a company, so congratulations': Amazon has plenty of Nvidia GPUs, but not enough energy to power its AI boom

Nvidia's RTX 5090 GPU is 'unavailable' from many reputable retailers, approaching an asking price of $9,000 if you happen to track one down on Newegg's marketplace of resellers of dubious virtue. The AI boom is at least in part to blame for this, encouraging team green to shift production resources away from consumer hardware. However, business customers like Amazon are running into logistical issues that just add insult to injury for PC gamers left out in the cold.

Amazon Web Services took delivery of approximately $5 billion of Nvidia GB300 racks in August alone, according to an email seen by Business Insider. Reportedly, the cloud company has also accepted $3 billion worth of hardware each month since. The kicker is that, despite having all of this kit lined up to install in its data centres, AWS does not yet have enough energy to power everything.

This is one reason AWS's free cash flow dropped from $53 billion in Q2 of 2024, to $7.6 billion during Q2 2026. Free cash flow is now in the red according to a leaked recording of an internal staff meeting last month; AWS CFO John Felton joked to the executive leading the company's AI infrastructure, Prasad Kalyanaraman, "You've taken us free cash flow negative as a company, so congratulations."

This friendly joke can only hide so much pain though. Obviously, AWS is no stranger to building data centres, but at this speed and scale, the company is having to juggle multiple different infrastructure timelines amid a whole lot of near-term volatility when it comes to hardware pricing.

Typically, AWS would foot the bill for Nvidia's GPU racks only once they were installed. However, with no clear idea of when that will be, Amazon has had to implement an "Early Rack Receipt" process in the meantime. With no way to power this paid for hardware, that leaves a lot of cash tied up in tech AWS can't actually use—hence the reportedly negative free cash flow.

But AWS is not inclined to stop scooping up GPU racks or pause its AI infrastructure build out any time soon. Free cash flow problems aside, AWS's second quarter revenue grew by 37% year-over-year This was the fastest growth AWS has seen in 18 quarters, making $42.2 billion by the end of July. That's a big win that in turn encourages more big spending.

Indeed, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently described AI as "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" to investors, with the company intending to spend almost $200 billion on its infrastructure buildout. On a recent earnings call, Jassy even said he was sure the company has a "clear line of sight to strong financial returns" on that sizable investment. But in the near-term, while AWS figures out its power problems, a lot of that investment may well be sat collecting dust somewhere.