alt Hacker News> Do you have a war chest to drag out a legal battle and the ability to bankrupt your landlord
Their war chest is not sufficiently larger than the hyperscalers, Broadcom or PE financiers like BlackRock.
> The rules are different at this scale, and "you can't enforce a contract if the attempt will bankrupt you" is only one of the possible games.
Rather, the inverse of what you said and far less Machiavellian.
It is legally well established that take-or-pay contracts are unenforceable if it would bankrupt the buyer which is the more likely resolution in this case. However, this does not mean frontier labs just get to walk away. They would settle in court for a penalty that is less than the full contract price.
See: AMD/global foundries and pretty much every oil and gas or commodity deal that goes bust when market pricing makes extraction unfeasible.
> Their war chest is not sufficiently larger
That's not the metric. The legal system is pay-for-delay, not pay-to-win. Once you have enough money to delay, it becomes a contest of who has the longer runway, and that probably goes to the frontier labs rather than the neoclouds who have little alternative revenue and comparatively airtight debt obligations.
> take-or-pay contracts are unenforceable if it would bankrupt the buyer which is the more likely resolution in this case. However, this does not mean frontier labs just get to walk away. They would settle in court for a penalty
Regardless, the terms come down to positioning and bargaining power. Runway vs obligations. This seems to dramatically favor the labs.