AI Transparency Institute · Research Tools

Chip-Backed Finance Observatory

The first open research database of debt secured by AI chips: hand-collected deal terms, a GPU collateral price index, the vendor announcement-event calendar, and a map of who ultimately holds the risk.

BETA · v1.0 · Data compiled from public sources Data as of: loading…

Why this observatory exists

A new collateral class is forming: loans secured by GPUs, leased to AI companies, syndicated, securitized, and resold to insurers and pension funds. Its defining feature has no precedent: the collateral's depreciation clock is controlled by the vendor that sells the chips and invests in the financing vehicles. No systematic public dataset existed. This observatory builds it, openly, before the asset class is first tested.

Transactions tracked in the deal registry
≈ −73%H100 resale value decline, 2023 → mid-2026USD ~30,000 → ~8,000 · press-compiled
~50%Residual value after 3 years reportedly assumed in early GPU-backed securitizationsas reported, 2024–2026
Dated events in the announcement calendarvendor product cycle + deals

The four components

1 · Deal Tracker. Hand-collected terms of chip-backed loans, leases, bonds and securitizations, each entry carrying its source and a verification flag.

2 · GPU Collateral Price Index. Resale and rental-rate series for major accelerator generations: the observable value of the collateral behind the loans.

3 · Announcement-Event Calendar. Dated vendor architecture events, past and announced. These scheduled, public events are what reprice the entire collateral base, and the backbone of event-study research.

4 · Holdings Map. Who ultimately holds the risk, mapped from insurance statutory filings and fund disclosures. In active collection.

Companion research: Silicon as Collateral: Vendor-Supported Chip-Backed Debt and the Financing of the AI Buildout (Thelisson, working paper, 2026).

Deal Tracker

Every entry lists its public source. VERIFIED = confirmed by a primary source (e.g., issuer press release). REPORTED = financial-press reporting, not independently verifiable. Amounts in USD.

⚠ Human review pending. Entries marked PENDING REVIEW were added automatically by our source watch and have not yet been verified by a human curator. Treat them as unconfirmed alerts, not as documented facts. They are verified, corrected or removed at the next curation pass.
DateTransactionTypeAmountKey termsStatusSource

GPU Collateral Price Index

Indicative series for the Nvidia H100, the reference collateral of the first deal vintages. Points are compiled from published trackers and press analyses; a formally constructed, citable index is the observatory's next release.

H100 resale value (USD per unit, secondary market)
Peak scarcity to mid-2026. Note the step behavior around new-generation availability, not smooth drift.
H100 rental rate (USD per GPU-hour, market range midpoint)
Rental rates are the collateral's cash-flow engine: they service the leases that service the debt.
Reading the two charts together: early securitizations reportedly assumed ~50% residual value after three years. The observed resale path fell to ~27% in that window, while the rental rates underpinning lease payments fell by 70–80% from peak before partially recovering.

Announcement-Event Calendar

Vendor product-cycle events reprice the collateral base. Financing events build the exposure. Dashed = announced or expected. This calendar is the backbone for event-study research: the dates are scheduled and public before they move prices.

Holdings Map

Who ultimately holds chip-backed risk? Once loans are syndicated and securitized, the exposure migrates to regulated balance sheets. No one currently publishes this aggregate. We are building it.

Status: in active collection

Source 1 — U.S. insurance statutory filings. Schedule D and Schedule BA disclosures identify structured securities and fund interests held by insurers, the first regulated window on distribution. Collection of 2025–26 filings in progress.

Source 2 — Fund disclosures. Private credit fund reports and listed-fund holdings referencing chip-lease and GPU-backed exposures.

Source 3 — Syndication reporting. Press-documented participations in the tracked deals.

First release target: an aggregate exposure estimate and a concentration measure on the single-vendor obsolescence factor, the one number no market participant can compute alone.

Hold relevant data? Contact us

Methodology & Contribute

Method

Entries are compiled exclusively from public sources: issuer press releases, offering materials, regulatory filings, published market trackers, and the financial press. Every entry carries its source. Primary-source confirmation earns a VERIFIED flag; press-only items remain REPORTED. Entries surfaced by our automated source watch enter as PENDING REVIEW and are clearly bannered until a human curator verifies the source and assigns a definitive badge, or removes them. The machine never assigns VERIFIED or REPORTED. Nothing on this page is investment advice, and inclusion of a transaction implies no judgment about any named party. Corrections are welcome and acknowledged.

How the data are updated

The observatory is curated by hand, entry by entry, from public sources. There is no automated feed, and that is deliberate: verification is the product. Technically, the page loads its data at every visit from a separate file (observatory-data.json) published alongside it, so updates appear to all visitors the moment the file is replaced, and the "Data as of" date in the header shows the release you are viewing. You can also press "Check for updates" at any time.

Openness

The database is released under CC BY 4.0. Quarterly snapshots will be archived with a citable reference. Researchers may reuse the data with attribution to the AI Transparency Institute.

Contribute

We welcome: deal terms and documents we have missed, secondary-market price observations, holdings disclosures, and corrections. Submissions are reviewed before inclusion and flagged by verification status.

Submit data or a correction