Methodology

What Counts as a Deal

A deal enters the ledger when all four hold:

1. At least one party is publicly traded, a hyperscaler subsidiary, or a private company at obvious scale (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI class).
2. The subject is AI compute or AI data center capacity: GPU cloud contracts, IT-load leases for AI campuses, chip or server purchase commitments, AI data center build contracts, financing backstops, or equity investments explicitly tied to compute supply.
3. The headline value is disclosed or computable at $100M or more, or the capacity is 50 MW or more when no dollar value is disclosed.
4. Two independent sources exist, and at least one is primary (a filing, press release or shareholder letter) or tier-1 (Reuters, Bloomberg, CNBC, WSJ, FT). Aggregator sites never establish a row on their own.

Excluded: generic enterprise cloud contracts with no AI or capacity specifics, internal capex programs with no counterparty, and land purchases with no IT-load commitment.

Status Grades

• Binding: a signed, definitive agreement per the parties themselves.
• LOI / MOU: a letter of intent or memorandum, announced by the parties but not definitive. The Nvidia-OpenAI $100B partnership is the canonical example.
• Framework: announced umbrella agreements whose commercial terms are not yet contracted.
• Reported: credible tier-1 reporting of talks or unsigned terms, denied by nobody, confirmed by nobody.
• Terminated / Superseded: dead rows stay visible, they never vanish.

Only binding deals enter the headline totals. Everything else is displayed, labeled, and excluded.

Why the Totals Refuse to Double Count

• Expansion chains. When a second lease lands on the same campus with the same counterparty, it is a separate row linked to its parent. Each row is its own incremental contract, so summing rows is safe, and "campus total" restatements are never stored as deals.
• Snapshot rows. A company restating "$36B of total contracted backlog" or "more than $60B of orders received" is disclosing a snapshot that overlaps its own discrete deals. The same applies to program envelopes like Stargate's announced $500B, whose discrete contracts earn their own rows as they sign. Snapshot rows (basis: total backlog, order intake or program envelope) appear in the table, labeled, and are excluded from every summed figure.
• Renewal options. "Up to $50.2B with all renewal options" is upside, not a contract. Option value lives in its own field and its own column, never the headline.
• Circular deals. When the chip supplier finances its own customer, both the financing and the purchase can be real, and adding them still overstates net external demand. Circular rows carry a visible ↻ flag; the methodology position is flag, never net.
• MW before dollars. Contract dollars get restated, re-based and re-reported as prices move; megawatts and terms almost never do. Every dollar figure carries the date it was stated. Capacity leads the aggregates.

Verification

Every figure passes four checks before a row is published:

1. Scale: does the value fit the announcing company's size and prior deals?
2. Arithmetic: value, megawatts and term must multiply out to a sane price per MW-year; totals must equal their parts.
3. Consistency: the row must not contradict figures already published on this site or in the ledger without a logged revision explaining why.
4. Sourcing: two independent sources, one primary or tier-1, recorded on the row itself.

A validation suite enforces the mechanical half of these rules in CI; a row that fails cannot be published at all. When a published figure later proves wrong, the row is corrected and the change is logged in the changelog: corrections stay visible, they are never silent.

The Candidate Queue

Deals we believe exist but have not yet verified to the standard above. Listing them here is deliberate: it tells you what the ledger is missing, and it stops an unverified figure from borrowing the credibility of the verified ones.

• xAI Colossus expansion and any third-party compute or financing deals at ledger scale.

  Holding because: Not yet researched in-session; xAI discloses irregularly, mostly via posts rather than filings.

• Stargate site-level build contracts (Abilene/Crusoe, additional sites) that may deserve rows distinct from any top-level OpenAI-Oracle contract.

  Holding because: Not yet researched in-session; high double-counting risk against the Oracle contract, needs careful expansion_of/basis mapping.

License & How to Cite

The dataset is licensed CC BY 4.0. Use it, republish it, chart it, build products on it, including commercially. The only requirement is attribution with a link. Suggested forms:

AI Compute Deal Ledger, Regards of Wallstreet, retrieved 2026-08-03, https://www.regardsofwallstreet.com/data/ai-deals

Source: Regards of Wallstreet AI Compute Deal Ledger (CC BY 4.0)

Machine-readable exports: JSON · CSV. Corrections and missing deals: contact us.