GPU Loan Rates in 2026: What Drives the Price in Public Deals

Summary

• Rates are deal-specific. Public 2026 deals priced at about 2.13% to 5.50% over SOFR, the benchmark overnight dollar rate, with investment-grade fixed coupons near 6–7%.
• The spread, a lender's margin over the base rate, follows offtaker credit, contract length against loan tenor, seniority and structure, and fixed versus floating.
• The hardware sets the size of a GPU loan, and the offtake contract behind it sets most of the price.

Introduction

Search for GPU loan rates and you'll usually find one quoted number with no deal behind it. That number tells an operator very little, because the same sponsor can pay very different margins on two facilities in the same year. Nscale's 2026 filings show a gap of more than three points between its tightest and widest new facilities.

This article sets out what public 2026 deals show, what drives the spread, and how base rates and rental prices feed in. It ends with the levers you can change before your next GPU financing, including if you don't have an investment-grade offtaker.

Every rate quoted here is either a margin over SOFR or a fixed coupon. Neither is an all-in cost, because fees, discounts and reserve funding sit on top. Read each figure as the headline price of one deal.

What Public 2026 Deals Show About GPU Loan Rates

Public 2026 GPU loan rates ran between about SOFR + 2.13% and SOFR + 5.50%, and investment-grade fixed-rate deals priced near 6–7%. The tightest pricing, about SOFR + 2.1–3.0%, went to rated, fully amortizing facilities backed by investment-grade offtakers. Deals rated below investment grade, or backed by offtake contracts shorter than the debt, priced at about SOFR + 5.00–5.50%.

Each figure is a margin over SOFR or a fixed coupon, and costs sit on top of it. Those costs include fees, reserve funding and original issue discount (OID), where lenders fund less than the loan's face value. The deals below are illustrations shown side by side, and they don't measure a single investment-grade premium.

IREN closed its $3.65bn financing on June 1, 2026, secured against the GPUs and associated contracted cash flows and anchored by Microsoft's offtake. It pairs a hedged delayed-draw term loan (DDTL), which is drawn in stages as hardware is delivered, with a fixed-rate private placement. IREN disclosed a blended cost of debt of 6.00%, excluding fees.

Lambda's $926 million term loan B priced at SOFR + 3.00% in August 2026, for an investment-grade offtaker. A term loan B is a loan syndicated to institutional investors, and this one was issued at 99.5% of principal. In October 2026, Lambda closed a $1.008bn DDTL at 6.78% fixed, backed by two investment-grade offtakers.

Nscale's S-1, filed September 18, 2026, shows the widest spread within one sponsor. Its Ward County and North Carolina facilities float at three-month Term SOFR, a forward-looking SOFR rate set for the period, plus 2.375%. Its February 2026 GPU Financing Facility pays Term SOFR + 5.00%, and its July 2026 Macquarie Iceland Facility pays Term SOFR + 5.50%. A 2025 Macquarie senior loan priced at SOFR + 7.50%.

CoreWeave's DDTL 4.0's floating tranche paid SOFR + 2.25% (March 2026, Moody's A3). CoreWeave priced its DDTL 5.5 (August 2026, Moody's Ba2, Fitch BB+) at SOFR + 5.50%. DDTL 5.5 is about five-year debt against offtake contracts averaging about three years. CoreWeave said its lenders showed "a willingness to underwrite renewal risk."

What Drives the Spread on a GPU Loan

The offtaker's credit and how the offtake contract lines up with the debt set most of a GPU loan's margin. Nscale shows it within one sponsor. It pays Term SOFR + 2.375% on its rated, hyperscaler-contracted Ward County facility and Term SOFR + 5.00% on its February 2026 GPU facility.

Seniority, structure and the choice of fixed or floating move the price from there. Offtaker jurisdiction is a newer input. In each case, GPU loan rates follow the revenue that repays the loan.

Offtaker credit and contract length versus tenor

Moody's assigned Baa1 on August 12, 2026 to Nscale Ward County Borrower SPV, LLC's senior secured DDTL of up to $1.831 billion, part of the $1.85bn facility in the S-1. The rating rests on "a hyperscaler customer rated at least Aa3" under a "six-year take-or-pay" contract. Under take-or-pay, the customer pays for its committed capacity whether or not it uses it; read how take-or-pay contracts work.

The loan fully amortizes within the contract term, which Moody's said "eliminates refinancing and recontracting risk." "Material deterioration of the offtaker's credit quality" is one of the factors Moody's lists that could lead to a downgrade.

Tenor, the length of the loan, is the lever operators control most. CoreWeave's DDTL 5.5, covered above, runs longer than the offtake contracts behind it and priced wider. In our view, a lender pricing a loan that outlasts its contract is pricing the chance of re-leasing the GPUs at an unknown future rate.

Seniority and structure

The tight-spread deals are senior secured debt held in a bankruptcy-remote SPV. That is a separate company holding the GPUs, offtake contracts and revenue accounts, set up so its assets stay apart from the parent's other creditors. Moody's also cites strict funding conditions, direct agreements with key counterparties and required liquidity reserves in the Ward County rating.

Investment-grade deals also amortize fully. Lambda's $926M facility runs to December 31, 2030 on a schedule aligned with its contracted cash flows. The balance falls as the offtake revenue comes in, and it reaches zero at maturity without a refinancing.

Fixed versus floating, and what you actually pay

A floating GPU loan pays SOFR plus a margin, reset each period, while a fixed loan locks its rate at pricing. Fixed rates are set off a swap rate, the fixed rate that trades against floating SOFR for the same term, or off a Treasury yield. Nscale's fixed tranches price at 2.375% plus the SOFR swap rate, and IREN's private placement carries a fixed rate equivalent to SOFR + 2.13%.

Borrowers can also fix floating debt with hedges, as IREN did on its DDTL. Either way, the margin leaves out fees, OID and reserve funding. Lambda's term loan B was issued at 99.5% of principal, so lenders funded $99.50 for every $100 owed.

Illustrative example. Take a $100M floating-rate GPU loan with SOFR at 3.88%, the New York Fed rate for November 9, 2026. At SOFR + 2.375%, the rate is about 6.26%, and at SOFR + 5.00%, it is about 8.88%. The gap of about 2.6 points comes to about $2.6M of first-year interest on the full balance, before amortization.

Fees and OID would change the all-in figure on both loans. In this example, the margin is the input that moves the cost most.

Offtaker jurisdiction

Who the end customer is, and where it is based, now carries pricing weight beyond its credit rating. The Financial Times reported on November 3, 2026, as carried by AFP, on a new Nvidia condition for cloud clients. On new deals, Nvidia told them to sell at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese companies. Nvidia neither confirmed nor denied the report, and whether the test applies to capacity or revenue is unconfirmed.

The House passed H.R. 2683, the Remote Access Security Act, on January 12, 2026. The 369–22 vote sent it to the Senate, where it was referred to the Banking Committee on January 13, 2026. The bill isn't law.

Our view is that lenders are likely to ask who the offtaker is and where it is based, alongside its rating. An offtake contract that documents the customer's location and ownership would answer that question early. The rules are still moving, so we'd treat this as a diligence item to prepare for.

How Base Rates, Rental Prices and Chip Cadence Feed into the Price

Floating-rate GPU debt moves with SOFR, and collateral risk moves with rental prices and the chip cycle. SOFR was 3.88% on November 9, 2026, according to the New York Fed. Unhedged floating deals in the table above reset with SOFR or Term SOFR each period, plus their margin.

Silicon Data's H100 Rental Index read $3.01 per GPU-hour on November 9, 2026. Silicon Data reported $2.00 on December 9, 2025. Rental income supports a deployment's debt-service coverage, and residual value supports the collateral if lenders have to enforce. In our view, a falling rental price would squeeze uncontracted revenue first.

NVIDIA's FY2026 10-K describes a "one-year product cadence". In our view, that cadence is a residual-value input for lenders, since each new generation can lower what the prior one earns and sells for. Fully amortizing structures limit how much of a loan depends on that residual value.

Compute futures aren't trading yet. On November 4, 2026, NYMEX consented to extend the CFTC review of the Silicon Data H100 and B200 Rental Index Futures to January 8, 2027. Silicon Data is CME Group's index partner for those contracts.

If the contracts list, operators could in principle hedge some rental income. That might give lenders more comfort on revenue that isn't contracted. It's too early to say whether it would change GPU loan rates.

What Operators Can Do to Price a GPU Loan Lower

The levers that move GPU loan rates sit mostly in the offtake contract and the deal structure. Each one below shows up in the public 2026 deals, and you can work on each before you approach lenders.

• Match contract to tenor. Size the loan to fully amortize within the offtake contract term, as Ward County does, leaving no refinancing risk.
• Contract with a stronger offtaker. An investment-grade or prepaying customer narrows the spread, because the customer's payments carry the loan.
• Ring-fence the deployment. Hold the GPUs, contracts and revenue in an SPV, with reserves and direct agreements with key counterparties.
• Choose fixed or floating deliberately. Fix the rate, or hedge floating exposure as IREN did, when your offtake revenue is fixed.
• Compare all-in cost. Add OID, undrawn fees and reserve funding to the margin before you compare two offers.

Without an investment-grade offtaker, the structure levers matter more, since contract length and ring-fencing are still in your control. Lenders weigh all five through their own credit process, and you can read how GPU loan underwriting works. The contract terms behind the first two levers are set out in what an offtake agreement covers.

Conclusion

GPU loan rates are deal-specific, and the offtake contract and structure set most of the price. Public 2026 deals priced between about SOFR + 2.13% and SOFR + 5.50%, and some of the widest gaps appeared within a single sponsor.

Below the multi-billion-dollar rated facilities sits the Compute Middle Market, the GPU cloud operators between startups and hyperscalers. The Compute Middle Market tracker counts GPU-backed financings of $500M or less. As of November 3, 2026, it lists 46 publicly announced deals since January 2023, totalling $5.04B, with a median deal of $44.2M.

USD.AI brings one rubric and one structure to that market. Every deal financed through USD.AI is scored by Compute IQ on a 100-point scale, across the operator, the customer and the contract. The score places the loan in one of three pricing tiers, and deals scoring below 60 aren't financeable.

GPU financing through USD.AI comes at fixed or floating rates. Loans cover up to 80% of deployment cost, with the operator contributing at least 20% as equity. Terms run 3–5 years with straight-line monthly amortization.

To see where your next deployment would score, Talk to USD.AI.

FAQ

What are typical GPU loan interest rates?

No single rate applies to GPU loans. Public 2026 deals ranged between about SOFR + 2.13% and SOFR + 5.50%, depending on the offtaker and the structure. Investment-grade fixed deals priced near 6–7%.

Are GPU loans fixed or floating rate?

GPU loans come in both forms. Floating loans pay SOFR plus a margin. Fixed loans are priced off a swap or Treasury rate at funding, as with Lambda's 6.78% coupon in October 2026.

How long are GPU loans?

Investment-grade GPU loans in 2026 ran about four to seven years and amortized within their offtake contracts. Lambda's two 2026 facilities mature on December 31, 2030 and May 30, 2033.