A customer that has contracted for the capacity a project will supply; an offtake agreement is that contract, and lenders lend against it. Chapters 6, 10.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 6 — Firm, Around-the-Clock
Where the electricity comes from: grid queues, transformers, turbines and the firm power a datacenter needs every hour of the year, on calendars the buildout does not control.
- Chapter 10 — The Lender’s Decision
Who is lending the money and who bears the loss: the bonds, leases and guarantees behind the largest campuses, and how the paper reaches ordinary retirement accounts.
Also discussed in
- Campus Colossus 1
Sources that use it
- Daniel Nishball, Cheang Kang Wen, Zane Fong and six others, “Nvidia GPU Debt Backstop Unleashes the AI Project Trinity: Capital, Offtake and Datacenters,” SemiAnalysis, 6 July 2026 (the free portion of a paid post, 4,541 of 6,043 words by the publisher’s count; the firm’s account of lenders’ practice and its own price estimate: “banks look at the DSCR ratios assuming revenue earned under the scenario where the backstop is activated. They are looking for a DSCR of at least 1.3x”; for a GB300, “the current 6y fixed price of ~$4.00”) (SemiAnalysis sells subscriptions, consulting and its own models of chip, memory and datacenter supply into the markets it measures, the GPU clouds and their lenders among them; its section on NVIDIA’s own accounts is for paid subscribers and was not read; held in the Library since Sourcing’s capture of 5 October 2026). In the Sources
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Offtake.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/offtake (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-offtake-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Offtake}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/offtake},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}