Power is the industry’s most visible unit of scale. It is also one of the easiest numbers to misuse. A company may report a site pipeline, contracted utility power, active power, critical IT load or customer capacity that has begun billing. Each measure marks a different point in the journey from a possible facility to an earning asset.
Contracted power may support a long construction plan. Active power means some infrastructure has been energized under the company’s definition. Billable capacity requires a customer service to have commenced. Those stages can overlap, and companies do not always report each one. Adding them together would count parts of the same buildout more than once.
CoreWeave / supplied Q2 2026 disclosure
Company-defined total contracted power.
Active power is not a reported billable IT-load figure.
Separate disclosed measures · stages can overlap and are not additive · Q2 2026
Delivery is a separate question from demand
Contracts and backlog describe future customer commitments, subject to delivery terms and timing. Recognized revenue records services provided in a reporting period. A signed commitment does not tell us how many GPUs are installed today, how much of their time is billed, or what the provider earns per GPU-hour.
Core Scientific illustrates a different business model. Its supplied Q2 2026 ledger reports approximately 1,100 MW of leased customer IT power and 395 MW of billable customer IT power. Its revenue comes from colocation services, so its dollars per MW cannot be compared directly with a GPU cloud’s rental revenue per GPU-hour. The roles, power bases and capital obligations need to be identified first.
From an hourly price to a return
Posted GPU rental rates show what customers may be asked to pay for a defined product and term. They do not reveal negotiated contract rates or billable utilization. To test a deployment, start with the hardware count per IT MW, the installed facility and equipment cost, a realistic rental-price assumption and the share of hours actually billed. Then subtract operating costs before calculating a simple payback.
That calculation is useful as a sensitivity, especially when prices or utilization change. It is not a measured company return. Financing, construction delays, hardware replacement and customer contract terms can materially change the answer. The model therefore exposes its assumptions, and its price link is labeled as a posted reference.
The next analytical step is to track the same definitions through successive disclosures: did contracted capacity become active, did active capacity begin billing, and did revenue and cash contribution grow enough to support the capital deployed? That sequence is more informative than an isolated GW headline.
This is a working research draft based on the repository’s manually curated disclosure ledger. Figures and wording require source review before public publication. Core Scientific source ↗