AI Compute Precommitments Concentrate Risk

Large, long‑dated contracts (>$10B; hundreds of megawatts) between AI platforms and single silicon vendors concentrate technological, financial and energy risk: the buyer ties future product roadmaps to vendor supply while the vendor’s IPO and national energy planners face a lumpy build schedule. Those precommitments change who controls the compute stack and shift macroeconomic, grid and national‑security tradeoffs into bilateral commercial deals. — Such contracts reshape industrial policy, energy infrastructure planning, and antitrust/financial oversight because they lock up scarce compute and power capacity and create systemic dependencies between private firms and national grids.