Securing large GPU capacity now requires 3-5 year contracts with 20-30% prepayment, fundamentally changing the working capital dynamics and creating pressure to go public sooner to access lower-cost capital.

Tuhin explains that getting a large block of Blackwell GPUs from a reputable cloud now requires a 3-5 year contract with 20-30% prepayment, which means inference companies need both proven demand and low-cost capital—pushing companies like Baseten toward an IPO sooner. ✦ AI generated

Tuhin Srivastava · No Priors · 2026-05-01 · original ↗

So if you wanted 1000, 1024 B2 hundreds, which is, from a good cloud. Right now you're not getting that less than a three to five year contract. Right now with a probably a 20 to 30% TCV prepay. So like actually what becomes important when acquiring capacity is you need to have enough demand to supply it to serve, but then you also need a low cost of capital, which is actually changing the dynamic pretty significantly. Does that impact how you think about going public as a company? Because arguably. Yeah. I think you'd go sooner. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think you need, like, I think the, and I think there was demand for that, but I think, you know, the pull, the, it also, you know, one of our One of the realizations that we had recently, and we're software people, and so we don't think like this all the time, is that our business has very interesting working capital requirements. And I think even, and that as a result of that, it has very interesting financing.

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