Nvidia chips pile up in Amazon warehouses as power shortages stall AI buildout

AWS bought Nvidia GB300 racks faster than its data centers can plug them in, leaving some hardware sitting dark in interim storage Amazon Web Services has a problem most companies would envy: it bought so much Nvidia hardware that it has nowhere to plug it in. Through what it calls the “Early Rack Receipt” program, AWS is set to take in roughly $5 billion worth of Nvidia GB300 server racks in August 2026. Some of those racks are reportedly landing in intermediary warehouses instead of humming away inside data centers, because the sites waiting for them lack the power to run them. The industry has a name for this: “dark GPUs.” These are chips that have been paid for, shipped, and stored, but never switched on. Buying first, plugging in later The scale matters here. After that initial batch of roughly $5 billion, AWS expects approximately $3 billion in monthly deliveries of these AI server racks in the months that follow. The strategy behind it appears deliberate. Internal emails indicate the procurement push was designed to lock down scarce AI hardware before rivals could get their hands on it. The bottleneck is not floor space. Some AWS facilities reportedly have room for the racks...