Adding It Up: The Other Side of the Headline

On October 8 a report about OpenAI’s revenue appeared, the shares of companies that sell AI computing fell, and none of their filings that day named OpenAI. The companies holding the labs’ largest commitments are the other side of the headline: each discloses its side in its own document, under its own rules. From that side, the largest commitments in the frame run to 3,133 times a year’s revenue, and every quantitative line that decides what a filer must say about a customer or a transaction is struck on one year or on one transaction.

October 8

The Financial Times reported on October 8 that OpenAI had told investors its annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion at the end of September, against about $70 billion circulated a few weeks earlier. The stated cause was a definition: Anthropic counts sales through cloud partners in its figure and OpenAI does not, and investors had grossed OpenAI’s figure up to compare the two.(1) [REPORTED]

By CNBC’s intraday count that day, CoreWeave fell 8 percent, Oracle 6, Intel and Super Micro 6 each, AMD and Broadcom 5 each, and NVIDIA 3.(2) [REPORTED] Of the seven, two filed anything on October 8: CoreWeave two Forms 4, and Super Micro a current report on an officer change. A full-text search for “OpenAI” across all seven filers’ documents for October 8 and 9 returned nothing.(3) [FILED; the probe is ours.] The record shows the sequence and no more: a report, then the moves, and the documents unchanged.

Our September 30 piece, “Adding It Up: How to Read an AI Headline,” set out four questions to put to an announced figure: the tenor, the twelve months, the fine print, and the reason the filer gives for reporting at all.(4) It read the headline from the side that announces it. This piece is its second half, and it reads the same commitments from the other side, from the filings of the companies holding them.

Three positions frame it, and each is stated once. Arrangements of this shape, a supplier taking equity in a customer, a chip maker guaranteeing a lease, a customer prepaying its supplier, appear in capital-intensive industry whenever the capital has to arrive before the revenue does, and the shape describes who owes what to whom. Outcomes arrive company by company, so the reading stays at the level of the company. And the headline total and the filed record are two lenses on the same commitments: the first is fast and reaches markets within the day, the second is slow and covers only filers, and the useful work is the reconciliation between them.

3,133 times a year’s revenue

Nscale filed its registration statement on September 18. At August 31 it carried $103.4 billion of active and contracted total contract value under long-term take-or-pay contracts, of which $2.6 billion was active.(5) [FILED] Its revenue for 2025 was $33.0 million.

$103.4 billion is 3,133 times $33.0 million. [OURS on FILED]

Each of the two largest contracts inside it, on its own, runs more than ten times the highest of the earlier rows, TeraWulf’s 112.8. Nscale’s agreements with Anthropic of August 25 provide for payments of up to approximately $44.6 billion, 1,352 times its 2025 revenue; its statements of work with Microsoft provide for up to approximately $43.8 billion through December 2033, 1,327 times.(5) [OURS on FILED] Total contract value is Nscale’s own defined measure. The accounting measure, remaining performance obligations under ASC 606 of $56.4 billion at June 30 plus $2.0 billion of minimum lease payments under ASC 842, comes to 1,770 times, and it predates the Anthropic agreements.(6) [OURS on FILED]

SB Energy, the SoftBank developer building for OpenAI in Ohio and Texas and the subject of “The Fourteenth Position” in September, filed its latest amendment on September 21. It reports backlog of approximately $439 billion against 2025 total revenue of $213.5 million.(7) [FILED] That is 2,057 times. [OURS on FILED] Of the $439 billion, approximately $1 billion is expected to be recognized within 24 months. The registration statement’s own description of the figure: “a hypothetical estimate based on management’s assumptions and is not necessarily indicative of future revenue.”(7)

Both figures come from registration statements still awaiting effectiveness. Nscale’s offering has yet to price, and IFR reported on September 25 that the launch of SB Energy’s had been postponed over a gap between the $50 billion valuation sought and investors’ indications.(8) [REPORTED] Each figure is the company’s description of itself in an offering document: the structure as proposed, before any buyer has priced it.

The earlier rows on the face come from the frame our September 30 piece declared: TeraWulf’s 20-year lease with Anthropic at 112.8 times, and Applied Digital’s contracted portfolio of $36 billion at 58.9 times its latest fiscal year.(9) Nscale and SB Energy sit more than an order of magnitude above both. Every row sits to the right of the one-year line; the nearest, CoreWeave’s compute for Jane Street at 1.17 times, is still more than a full year of CoreWeave’s revenue. Oracle, the largest company holding the far end of these commitments, sits at 9.9 times: remaining performance obligations of $664 billion at August 31 against fiscal 2026 revenue of $67,357 million.(10) [OURS on FILED]

A large ratio is what a contracted build looks like before the capacity is delivered, and every company on the face is building. The ratio carries no prediction about whether the contracts pay. What it measures is the distance between the commitment and the yardstick the rules apply to it.

Every quantitative line that decides what a filer must say about a customer or a transaction is struck on one year or on one transaction. ASC 280-10-50-42 tests a customer against 10 percent of a year’s revenues. Rule 1-02(w) tests a transaction’s significance against the filer’s assets, income or investments. Neither is denominated in a multi-year commitment, and the commitments on this face run from about five years to twenty. The one disclosure that does reach past a year, remaining performance obligations under ASC 606-10-50-13, asks for an aggregate and a timing and leaves out the customer, which is how Oracle’s $664 billion reaches the record as a total. This is the one claim here that can be wrong, because it rests on the rules rather than on any filer’s document. If a rule, staff guidance or filed disclosure applies a quantitative test to total contract value, we will update the finding.

One document, one date

Nscale and SB Energy are registering for the first time, so their current-report record is empty. Everything either has disclosed reached the public record in a registration statement: Nscale’s on September 18, SB Energy’s on September 1 with amendments on September 4 and September 21.(5)(7) CoreWeave, by comparison, put ten capital-markets filings on the record in thirty-eight weeks, each with an item election of its own.(11) [OURS on FILED]

A registration statement is the document with the strongest reason to be complete, because the party filing it is selling shares. Nscale’s shows what that buys. It files the form of its Anthropic order as Exhibit 10.25, redacts the price, and prints the terms.(12) [FILED]

The financing the order requires is benchmarked to the customer: “prevailing market terms for comparable financings for similar data center or GPU procurement transactions involving customers having a credit and risk profile comparable to Anthropic’s.” If the financing has not closed by a longstop date, whose length is redacted, “each party may terminate this Order... neither party will have any further obligation or liability under this Order.” The prospectus: “As of the date of this prospectus, we have not obtained binding commitments for any of the financings required to fund performance under the Anthropic Services Agreements.”(5) [FILED]

So the largest single commitment on the face is a ceiling on a contract that holds only if its financing closes by a set date, and the filer says so in its own exhibit. The same arrangement read from the announcing side is a number. SpaceX’s prospectus took the opposite route with its Anthropic agreements: it prints the money, $1.25 billion a month through May 2029, and the agreement is absent from its exhibits.(13) [FILED] One filer prints the terms and withholds the price; the other prints the price and withholds the terms.

The same guarantee at two sizes

NVIDIA guarantees obligations at both of these builders, and the two guarantees reached the record at opposite ends of its disclosure.

At SB Energy’s PORTS-Pike campus in Ohio, NVIDIA’s residual value guaranties, read in “The Circle at the Gate,” are capped at $105 billion in aggregate. NVIDIA reported them in a current report of August 17 under Item 1.01, its material agreement item, and Item 2.03, the item for a new direct financial obligation or off-balance sheet arrangement, and filed the agreement as Exhibit 10.1 to its next quarterly report. SB Energy filed the form as Exhibit 10.31.(14) [FILED] Both sides filed.

At Nscale’s leased facility in Ward County, Texas, NVIDIA guarantees the first five years of lease payments up to $860.3 million, under an agreement of October 14, 2025, and was paid in warrants. Nscale holds $470.0 million in escrow as recourse for NVIDIA, which leaves $390.3 million of the guarantee uncovered by cash.(15) [FILED; the subtraction is ours.] NVIDIA’s own record names Nscale twice since September 2025, in an earnings release and an annual report to shareholders, both furnished, and neither mentions a guarantee.(16) [FILED probe] Seen from NVIDIA’s side, the Ward County guarantee has one filed end, and it is at Nscale.

The two instruments are the same kind of promise, and the larger is 122 times the smaller. Against NVIDIA’s total assets of $320,272 million at July 26, the PORTS-Pike cap is 32.8 percent and the Ward County guarantee is 0.27 percent.(17) [OURS on FILED] The line that decides what NVIDIA reports is struck on NVIDIA’s own size, so the same promise crosses it at one scale and sits far beneath it at the other. The smaller one reached the record because the party it protects is selling shares.

NVIDIA’s quarterly report carries a further $3.5 billion of “land, power, and shell guarantees for select AI cloud partners’ data center lease obligations in the event of their default,” as one figure, with no partner named.(18) [FILED] It is the pool of warrant-backed lease guarantees set out in “NVIDIA, The Scarce Thing Is a Credit Standing.” The description fits the Ward County guarantee’s form; whether that guarantee sits inside the figure is a question the documents we read leave open.

Named when raising money

Oracle’s quarterly report for the quarter ended August 31 carries remaining performance obligations of $664 billion, of which it expects to recognize about 13 percent in the next twelve months.(10) [FILED] The word “OpenAI” appears in that report zero times. So do “concentration” and “single customer.”(19) [FILED; the probe is ours.] OpenAI’s share of the $664 billion has been reported at about half, by S&P among others.(20) [REPORTED]

On February 2, 2026, Oracle filed a free writing prospectus, dated the day before, announcing its plan to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in the calendar year. It names the customers the money is for:

Named in the document that raises money, pooled in the document that reports results. Both are ordinary. The standard that requires the $664 billion asks for a total, and the segment rule that tests a major customer asks for the amount and leaves out the name. The difference between the two documents is the difference between their purposes, the pattern “Oracle, Adding It Up: One Column” applied to Oracle in July: names where the accounting compels them, the aggregate where it permits.

Microsoft names the same counterparty, with numbers, for a reason it states: it holds about a quarter of OpenAI, which makes OpenAI a related party under ASC 850, and its annual report discloses $24.1 billion of revenue from OpenAI and a $6.0 billion receivable, figures set against its total revenue in “What the Next Billion Costs.”(22) [FILED] Its commercial backlog of $678 billion names no customer; Microsoft put OpenAI’s share at about 45 percent on its January call.(23) [REPORTED]

On October 8 Oracle’s shares fell on the day of a report about a counterparty its quarterly report does not name. CoreWeave, which fell further, carries OpenAI on its record in a third way. When it went public in March 2025, CoreWeave named OpenAI and filed the agreement under which it issued OpenAI $350 million of Class A shares alongside the compute contract.(24) [FILED] It accounts for those shares as consideration paid to a customer, the treatment traced in “NVIDIA, A Little Bit of Money In”: no cash came in, and the value sits as an asset amortized against the revenue the contract earns, which makes the shares part of the price.(24) [FILED] Its quarterly report names OpenAI as a customer, at up to $6.5 billion through May 2031, and the indenture for its 9.625 percent notes of June 18 gives “the OpenAI Contract” a row of its own, deeming debt against it compliant at 75 percent loan to value, at 90 if OpenAI carries an investment grade, or at full cost if the debt is pure equipment financing, with all such debt capped at $7.0 billion.(25) [FILED]

Three holders of one counterparty, three records. Microsoft owns about a quarter of OpenAI, so the related-party standard names it with numbers. CoreWeave’s shares went the other way, as part of the price of a compute contract, and reached the record named in its registration statement and amortized in its revenue. Oracle has no stake either way and carries OpenAI inside a total. Each record follows the rule that reaches it, and none of the three changed a document on October 8.

Four ways to be quiet

Four mechanisms let an arrangement sit on the record without its counterparty’s name, and the other side adds instances to the first three.(26) Two of them have already appeared here. Oracle’s $664 billion and NVIDIA’s $3.5 billion are pooling: each is a total that no rule requires to be itemized, and each is complete as filed. The third, a split across provenance tiers, withholds nothing. CoreWeave filed the $1.0 billion equity leg of its arrangement with Jane Street and furnished the compute leg, about $6 billion, so the two legs of one relationship carry different liability. The fourth withholds the arrangement itself, and the one instance a reader of filings can find, Apple and Google’s search placement, reached the public through a courtroom.

Pooling and description are both quiet about the name, and they are different rules working. Pooling is a total that no rule itemizes. Description is an itemized disclosure with the counterparty left out. Nscale shows both inside one filer. Its draft registration statement of February 17, submitted in confidence and now public on EDGAR, names its largest 2025 customer: “our largest customer was ByteDance.” The registration statement of September 18 describes its largest 2025 customer as “a customer that represented 73% of our revenue.”(27) [FILED] One filer, two descriptions of the same position, named in the draft and described in the prospectus. Only the fourth row is an absence, and its count is what a reader of filings can find: one, surfaced by litigation.

The other side of $518 billion

The figure that opened this season of headlines was $518 billion: Anthropic’s compute commitments, from a draft prospectus Reuters reviewed, split six ways among Broadcom ($161.2 billion), Google ($111.1 billion), Amazon ($110 billion), SpaceX (up to $84.5 billion), Microsoft ($31.4 billion) and AMD (more than $20 billion).(28) [REPORTED] All six file with the Commission, and their filings put a commitment value on about $43.75 billion of the total, all of it SpaceX’s, on base terms, the figure our September 30 piece struck.(28) [OURS on FILED]

Three filed commitments to Anthropic sit outside the split. Nscale’s, up to approximately $44.6 billion, signed August 25. Akamai’s, $11.6 billion over seven years, filed September 24. TeraWulf’s 20-year Kentucky lease, about $19 billion, a figure carried only in its furnished release.(5)(29) [FILED, FILED and FURNISHED] The filed values outside the split, $56.2 billion, exceed the filed values inside it. [OURS on FILED]

That sentence adds three things measured three ways, and the addition is the point. Nscale’s figure is a ceiling on agreements that dissolve if the financing fails. Akamai’s runs seven years with no service start date in the filing. SpaceX’s is a base term that either party can end on 90 days’ notice. A total of the three would carry the defects of any headline aggregate: it double counts an expansion announced at its full value, it adds numbers struck on different bases, and it stops at the announcement, unchanged when a delivery gate passes or a financing fails to close.

OpenAI’s side has its own far end, and it is quieter this month. SB Energy’s leases with an OpenAI affiliate cover approximately 8.0 gigawatts of IT capacity on 20-year terms, and the PORTS-Pike campus is a substantial majority of its data center backlog.(7) [FILED] Its docket shows no amendment since September 21, four days before the postponement was reported.(30) [FILED probe] NVIDIA’s first $1.5 billion is already in: it prepaid that amount on August 17 for shares at 90 percent of the offering price, under a prepaid forward contract, funded in full that day.(7) [FILED] SoftBank paid OpenAI the third and final $10 billion tranche of its follow-on investment on October 1, funded with foreign-currency senior notes.(31) [REPORTED, from the company’s release] And OpenAI’s own listing is reported to have moved to 2027, behind a bridge round of at least $30 billion at $1.4 trillion.(32) [REPORTED] SB Energy has had no market in which to react to October 8, and the record carries nothing that connects the two.

What we want, and what we watch

Anthropic’s registration statement, when it is distributed, is the first document in which the counterparty to these commitments speaks for itself; the reported timetable puts it at about October 25.(33) [OURS on REPORTED dates] These questions go into our review of it, and each is something we will look to confirm:

1. The schedule of the commitments by year, and by counterparty.
2. The share that is non-cancelable, which Reuters reported at about 80 percent with the SpaceX agreements outside it.(28)
3. Whether sales through cloud partners are recognized gross or net, which is the definition at the center of October 8.
4. How Anthropic describes the Nscale agreements and their financing condition from its side.
5. Whether the figures that circulated in September match any figure it files.

The other documents that bear on this reading, and when each is due, sit with these questions on the face that follows.(34) Where one of them says something different, we will update the findings.

The other side of the headline is a set of companies building against contracts many times their size, describing those contracts in the documents their own rules require. The headline adds them up. The filings, read one at a time, say what each company is owed, by whom, on what terms, and what ends the obligation. Both lenses are needed. On October 8 the headline changed, and the filings stayed where they were.

Free to read, no paywall. Readers who find the work useful can support it at the foot of the page; payment offsets the time and buys no access. Corrections run in daylight, dated, in a comment or in the following piece, and a reader who finds one is doing us a favor.

Analysis: Cape Fear Advisors.