Do not sign below one-fifth prepayment, and book the equity a customer asks for as customer-acquisition cost. Per Nscale's S-1, weighted-average customer prepayment is 23% and Anthropic's is zero; per Akamai's 9/24 press release, it issued warrants to Anthropic capped at about 5% of shares, strike $111.33.
Judgment
The mainstream reads neocloud risk as customer concentration. The diary reads it as how the contract allocates risk: the tenant prepays nothing, the supplier carries all the financing, and suppliers now issue equity to customers too. Contracted TCV is the tenant's option, and a large deal's contract value should be counted net of the equity given away.
Facts
Nscale S-1 (2026-09-18): weighted-average customer prepayment 23%; no fees on Anthropic's up to $44.6B tranches until acceptance. Akamai 9/24, press-release basis: Anthropic commits $11.6B over seven years; warrants for about 2% of shares vest with existing commitments, about 1% per additional $3B. AMD 8-K: on 2025-10-05 it issued OpenAI warrants for up to 160 million shares at a $0.01 strike.
What to do
For founders: do not sign below one-fifth prepayment; if a customer asks for warrants, count the dilution as customer-acquisition cost; lock the contract before buying cards, and do not pitch financing on GPU residual value. For investors: open the 8-K first on any large deal, deduct warrant dilution from contract value before computing multiples, and anchor valuation on activated plus financing-covered TCV.
Falsifier (verbatim from the diary footnote)
This entry's thesis: "suppliers issuing equity to customers will become a standard term in compute procurement." Within 12 months from 2026-09-25 (to 2027-09-25), count compute supply contracts newly signed between listed compute, chip, cloud or data-center suppliers and frontier model companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, Meta, Mistral and leading Chinese labs), with single contract value ≥ $5B, disclosed via the supplier's 8-K, an HKEX announcement or an official press release, excluding the Akamai–Anthropic and AMD–OpenAI deals: if ≥ 3 of them include warrants, equity or convertible instruments issued to the customer, mark verified; 0 deals, mark ✗; 1–2 deals, mark ⏳ and publish the list. Scope: the warrant must appear in the original text of the supplier's 8-K Item 1.01/3.02 or an equivalent regulatory filing, media paraphrase does not count; a supplier investing in its customer (e.g. NVIDIA in OpenAI, ENTRY 126) is the reverse direction and is not counted. Adjudication sources: SEC EDGAR, HKEXnews, supplier press releases, listed deal by deal. Consequence: if ✗, this thesis is marked ✗ in the ledger and annotated in llms.txt; if verified, "contract value net of warrants" is written into this site's compute valuation basis, with ENTRY 122, 126 and 129 annotated retroactively.
Disclosure: This diary is written and verified with Claude; discount any judgment about Anthropic, favourable or not; On publicly available information FutureX does not hold Nscale, CoreWeave, Nebius, NVIDIA or Microsoft; FutureX Capital holds Mistral AI; discount in both directions.