Customers put up much of the money for the AI capacity Oracle sold last quarter. Oracle booked more than $30 billion of additional AI cloud contracts in Q1, increasing its RPO to $664 billion, and finance chief Hilary Maxson said the vast majority came through prepayment, bring-your-own-hardware, or similar structures. The company says those contracts have no incremental impact on its plans to raise capital, and it sold $20 billion of common stock during the quarter.
A cloud provider normally buys the GPUs first and earns the cost back over years of rent. Prepayment moves that purchase onto the buyer's cash. Bring-your-own-hardware leaves the servers on the buyer's books, and the provider sells the space, power and operations around them. Much of Oracle's new backlog runs on its customers' money.
Qualcomm's server chip agreement with Amazon runs in the opposite direction. Amazon holds a warrant for up to 25,000,000 Qualcomm shares at $161.26 each, vesting as it places orders and makes purchases up to a maximum amount of $60 billion. Amazon is paid in Qualcomm stock for the orders it commits to. On issuance, 3,750,000 shares vested on Amazon's initial purchase commitments.
The marketplace H200 low end fell to $1.98 a GPU-hour from $3.60, a tenth-percentile ask across 26 offers, while all four neocloud list ranges held for a fifth week. DeepSeek V4 Pro's cheapest listed route went back to $1.60 and $3.20 a million tokens, taking the support-assistant floor to $416 a month from $271.
