Lambda taps $917M leveraged loan to fund Nvidia chip lease

Lambda is raising a $917 million leveraged loan to buy Nvidia GPUs it will then lease straight back to Nvidia, Bloomberg reports, a transaction that puts the chipmaker in four simultaneous seats around the same table: investor in the startup, seller of the silicon, biggest tenant on the resulting cloud, and counterparty on the underlying lease.

The mechanics, as The Next Web summarizes the Bloomberg reporting, are that Morgan Stanley is leading the deal into the institutional leveraged loan market at up to 3.75 percentage points over the benchmark rate, on a 4.4-year term that amortizes fully rather than balloons at maturity. Order books reportedly reached close to $2 billion against the $917 million ask. The chips finance a roughly $1.5 billion four-year lease under which Nvidia rents 18,000 of its own servers back from Lambda, an arrangement The Information first reported and one that instantly made Nvidia Lambda's largest customer.

The precedent sitting behind this is CoreWeave, whose $3.1 billion GPU-backed deal was, in Bloomberg's framing, the first of its kind to finance chips through the institutional leveraged loan market. CoreWeave priced at SOFR plus 4.50; Lambda is coming to market inside that spread on a shorter, more conservative amortization schedule, which is the kind of detail loan investors care about when the underlying collateral is depreciating silicon rather than a factory or a pipeline. This is our latest entry in a long run of coverage tracking neocloud debt-financed infrastructure buildouts. The same day, Anthropic, Macquarie and GIC launched Theseus, another dedicated vehicle for financing AI data centers.

Several things the reporting does not resolve: whether Nvidia carries any recourse or guarantee on the $917 million loan itself, how the proceeds split between GPUs and the surrounding server and networking build, and what lenders can do if the four-year leaseback is amended or exited before the loan finishes amortizing. The circular pattern of Nvidia investing, selling, and then renting back its own chips is a structural risk investors have to price in themselves rather than one that shows up on any one line of a term sheet.

For Lambda this is IPO scaffolding. The company has reportedly hired Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Citi ahead of a first-half 2026 listing, and locking in a multi-year anchor tenant with a name-brand logo is exactly the sort of contracted revenue a debt syndicate and an equity book both want to underwrite.