Chip designer AMD is reportedly acting as guarantor for Crusoe on a $300 million loan that the data center firm will use to procure AMD hardware.

AI data center provider Crusoe has taken out a loan from Goldman Sachs to buy AMD chips for a campus it is building in Springfield, Ohio. The chips themselves have been used as collateral to underwrite the loan, according to a report from The Information.

People familiar with the arrangement told The Information that AMD has agreed to rent the chips back from Crusoe if the company cannot find customers for its data center. This helped Crusoe get a loan with a six percent interest rate, far lower than it would have otherwise been able to obtain.

AMD and Goldman Sachs declined to comment to The Information, while Crusoe failed to provide an immediate response to the publication’s questions.

The deal is believed to be the first in which AMD chips have been used as collateral for a loan, but it mimics several similar arrangements struck by Nvidia with data center firms.

Nvidia has invested in Crusoe, as well as neoclouds CoreWeave, Nebius, Nscale, and Lambda. It has promised to purchase unsold compute capacity from CoreWeave for $6.3bn, alongside a $1.5bn deal with Lambda.

In October 2025, Nvidia was reported to be in talks to guarantee OpenAI’s data center loans, and a December regulatory filing revealed that it was underwriting an unnamed partner company’s data center lease, which could see the GPU maker on the hook for up to $860m if the end user defaults on payments.

The circular nature of these agreements has led to Nvidia facing criticism that it is falsely inflating the market in which it operates. In a leaked November note to analysts, the company refuted any suggestions that it is like historical fraudsters Enron, Lucent, and WorldCom.

Few details about Crusoe’s planned Ohio data center have been made public. The scheme was announced to little fanfare in December, with local media reporting that the company would receive a 50 percent sales tax exemption. The data center is expected to create 20 full-time jobs.