Three deals made public in the past week show how the AI buildout actually gets paid for. Cohere is raising equity with a national government in the round. NexGen Cloud borrowed against a fleet of Nvidia servers. And Fireworks signed a three-year compute contract, the kind of paper that makes such loans possible. The question is who’s left holding the risk if GPU values drop faster than the financing assumes.
Cohere’s Round Is a Target With Ottawa Inside It
Cohere said on October 29 that it had reached an initial close of a Series E targeting up to CAD $7 billion, at a CAD $35.7 billion valuation. The word matters. The company hasn’t said how much is committed or when the round will finish, though a spokesperson has said most of the target is secured. If it closes in full, Cohere says it will be the largest private raise in Canadian history. For scale, Cohere raised US$500 million at a US$6.8 billion valuation in August 2025.
German retail group Schwarz leads. Bell Ventures, Bullhound Capital and the Government of Canada are new, and Inovia Capital, Nvidia and Prosperity7 Ventures are back. Ottawa’s piece is up to CAD $1.6 billion in equity through the Canada Development Investment Corporation, paid in stages. The conditions are where it gets concrete: Cohere keeps its incorporation and headquarters in Canada, adds at least 1,000 technical jobs and puts at least CAD $1.7 billion into new Canadian computing infrastructure by 2030. So part of this sovereign equity comes with a compute spending bill attached.
Equity is the expensive way to fund hardware. It’s also the only kind here with no lender who can seize the servers. Cohere says annual recurring revenue grew 165 percent year over year through the third quarter.
NexGen Cloud’s Loan Puts the GPUs on the Line
USD.AI led and closed a $106 million senior secured term loan for NexGen Cloud, with Silver Point Capital and Victory Park Capital taking part. The loan runs four years and amortizes over that term. It pays for 216 Nvidia HGX B300 servers, 1,728 GPUs in total, at a Tier III data center in Finland, with servers expected to ship in the fourth quarter. That works out to about $61,000 of debt per GPU, server included.
Two things stand behind the loan: the hardware itself and a take-or-pay contract with what the companies call a major AI inference platform. They didn’t name it. USD.AI, which sells loans like this to institutional investors through its GPU Loan Exchange, says it has originated more than $500 million in GPU financing this year.
If the customer pays, the resale value of a B300 barely matters. If it doesn’t, the lenders are left with chips whose price depends on what Nvidia ships next. GPU lenders typically advance 60 to 70 percent of hardware value, so a 30 to 40 percent drop in chip prices could push collateral below the loan balance. Lenders also put a chip generation’s competitive life at two to three years, while buyers often depreciate GPUs over five or six. Amortization helps here, because the balance falls as the hardware ages. The supply side helps too, with SK Hynix calling the memory shortage through 2030. Still, four years is longer than two or three.
The Fireworks Contract Is What Lenders Underwrite
Forum Edge AI, a joint venture that Forum Markets (Nasdaq: FRMM) owns 51 percent of and Edge Node owns 49 percent of, signed a 36-month reservation of Nvidia B300 capacity with Fireworks. Total contract value is about $94.4 million, including CPU management node fees, or roughly $2.6 million a month. The 96 servers go into Edge Node’s already powered Dallas site, with deployment expected in late December or early January. Fireworks, last valued at about $17.5 billion, paid a prepayment deposit of undisclosed size.
Forum, which renamed itself from Ethereum treasury company ETHZilla in February, calls this Forum Edge’s first contracted customer. Its plan is to debt finance a material portion of the equipment with matched-duration loans, project by project, with Forum guaranteeing some of that project-level debt. Its own risk factors say that financing may not come on the assumed terms. The contract comes first, and the loan is built on it.
Watch three things now: how much of Cohere’s CAD $7 billion actually closes, whether NexGen’s B300s land on schedule, and whether Forum gets its Dallas equipment financed.