Lambda inks $1B private debt for Nvidia chip deal

Lambda has raised about $1B of private short-dated debt arranged by JPMorgan to buy Nvidia GPUs that Microsoft will lease, according to Bloomberg. The same structure funds Nebius, which borrowed $775M against its own chips and holds a five-year Microsoft contract worth $19.4B.

Lambda has raised about $1B of private debt to buy Nvidia chips that Microsoft will lease. JPMorgan arranged the short-dated deal and marketed it to private placement investors, Bloomberg reported.

The counterparty is the part that matters. Lambda is borrowing against Microsoft’s willingness to keep paying, not against its own revenue. Microsoft gets the compute without the debt.

It is the second such raise this month. Lambda borrowed $917M two weeks ago against a contract with Nvidia, which is simultaneously its investor, its supplier and a customer.

TNW has not independently verified the new terms. Bloomberg attributed them to people who were not authorised to speak publicly, and reported that JPMorgan declined its request for comment.

Lambda is also said to be in talks for as much as $3B ahead of a possible listing next year. Bloomberg counts more than $400B of AI-related debt raised globally in 2026 alone.

None of this is a purely American arrangement. Nebius raised $775M against its own GPUs this year, the first secured debt taken by the Amsterdam-headquartered company.

Its anchor tenant is the same one. Nebius holds a five-year Microsoft contract worth $19.4B and has said it has around $40B of contracts it could securitise.

So the collateral chain is short. A European lender is ultimately underwriting one American company’s continued appetite for compute it does not own. If the lease goes, the chips stay.

Supervisors have begun saying this carefully. The ECB warned in May about private credit’s “opaque valuation practices and limited liquidity“, and about portfolios concentrated in a few US issuers whose valuations track the AI narrative.

The Bank for International Settlements was blunter in June. It warned that an AI investment collapse could disrupt credit markets on the scale of 2008, and that poor disclosure of deal terms makes it hard to tell whether the same asset has been pledged twice.

Which lands awkwardly in Brussels. The companies the EU points to when it talks about sovereign compute are financing themselves against an American lease, and TNW has argued the framing is thinner than it looks.

The chips will sit somewhere and someone will own them. On this structure, the party carrying the loss is not the one using the compute.