Sustaining gigawatt-scale builds requires shifting the capital burden to upfront customer prepayments.
Faced with soaring capital requirements, cloud providers and data center operators are bypassing traditional debt and equity by forcing customers to prepay and underwrite their own hardware installations.
The same conclusion keeps arriving from across the workspace's research — 2 topics independently instantiate this theme. Filter the evidence by where it came from:
Oracle funding its buildout directly out of customer commitments is the customer-prepayment capital shift stated at RPO scale, with the customer literally recast as lender.
Oracle's heavy reliance on $75 billion in prepaid and customer-supplied hardware contracts exemplifies the shift toward having buyers underwrite the massive capital costs of gigawatt-scale builds.
Nebius funds its $20-25B capex ramp largely by having customers prepay 50-60% of landmark-deal capex, shifting the buildout's capital burden onto the buyers themselves.
Customers are prepaying to underwrite the operator's buildout, shifting the capital burden off the balance sheet.