Chip-Backed Finance Observatory

Something new is happening in the financing of artificial intelligence. Loans are now secured by the AI chips themselves. These GPU-backed loans fund the data centers behind the AI boom: the chips are leased to AI companies, and the debt is increasingly resold to insurers and pension funds. One detail makes chip-backed finance unlike anything in financial history: the pace at which the collateral loses its value is decided by the company that sells the chips and invests in the financing vehicles.

We looked for a public dataset on this market. There was none. So we built one.

The first open database of chip-backed finance

The Observatory tracks GPU-backed loans and AI infrastructure debt, deal by deal, with every entry sourced and marked as verified or reported. It follows what the chips are actually worth as GPU collateral, through their resale and rental prices. It keeps the calendar of chip announcements, the scheduled dates that reprice all the collateral at once. And it is mapping, filing by filing, who ends up holding the risk.

Open data, independent research

Everything here comes from public sources and is free to reuse with attribution (CC BY 4.0). The AI Transparency Institute is a non-profit. We hold no positions in, and accept no funding from, the firms we document. The research behind this tool is Chips as Collateral (Thelisson, 2026), available on SSRN.

If you spot an error, or hold data we are missing, write to us. This observatory improves with its readers.