Glossary
Compute deal
An agreement to buy, rent, or supply computing capacity for AI, often over many years.
In a compute deal, an AI company commits to buy or rent computing capacity, such as chips, cloud servers, or data center space, from a cloud provider, chip maker, or data center operator. These deals are often worth billions of dollars and run for several years.
Headline values are frequently "up to" amounts that depend on capacity actually being built and delivered, and are spread across many years. Payment may involve cash, stock, warrants, or credits.
The supplier counts the deal as future business, sometimes reported as contracted backlog, but backlog is not revenue until the capacity is delivered and paid for.
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