Hacker News Reader

Comment by impulser_ | Hacker News Reader

"in May 2026, we entered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI research and development public benefit corporation, with respect to access to compute capacity across COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II. Pursuant to these agreements, the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee"

Anthropic is paying them 1.25 billion per month to serve Claude in their data centers. That's more revenue than Starlink. In fact that's their largest revenue stream lol.

View on HN

> COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177

It may be sick, but someone's got a sense of humor over there :)

THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM

REESTABLISH THE LINK OR ACTION WILL BE TAKEN

wickedly underrated film. my all time favorite in the skynet genre.

the vocoder speech at the end is just exquisite.

SpaceX has a Golden Dome contract,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

That's basically exactly this ^

> "Thinking this will prevent war, the US government gives an impenetrable supercomputer total control over launching nuclear missiles"

That's not even close to what the Golden Dome is.

> The Golden Dome is a planned multi-layer missile defense system for the United States, intended to detect and destroy ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles before they launch or during their flight.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

"In 2019, Donald Trump said the satellites would also carry offensive weapons."

If the past 6 months haven't taught you that Trump is a chronic liar, I don't know what will.

More like he doesn't know how to keep things classified

That which is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Can't wait for the next model to be called "torment nexus" /s

As far as I can Google the colossus data centers did cost about 7-10 and 18 B respectively.

Renting them out in part at 1.25 B pr month sounds like a very good deal for spacex.

Opex and debt service will eat that cash flow.

It's really not.

can you elaborate?

Napkin math on 5 year depreciation is 5.5 billion per year for 28 billion. However the 28 billion is cash upfront, spacex is probably paying 10-20% interest on the 28 billion for another 2-6 billion per year.

So net you are looking at finance expenses of 7-11 billion per year. The electricity costs will be significant on top of that, but harder to get a solid read on.

Net of everything, spacex may be getting a 14-28 percent yield before paying for electricity. After electricity/insurance/data/taxes/other expenses - I’d guess it’s anywhere between 0% and 7% yield.

Odds are good that Anthropic abandons the deal before the depreciation schedule completes. Who is going to rent the GPUs then?

5.5 year depreciation is only on the chips. Power, networking, cabling, the actual construction of the building is probably closer to 60% of that number. Also, they are only renting out colosus 1 ($10B), not colosus II ($18B).

So, it's 10B, with $4b of that being attributed to a 5 year depreciation. The rest of the facility probably has a depreciation of around 20 years, and you can easily swap out GPU's, TPU's, Trititum, Tesla's own GPU's, as they start failing, so the normal depreciation curve only "kinda applies here".

There is no interest, as he was venture funded not debt funded.

Electricity is coming from Nat Gas Turbines, so again even though you have a some depreciation on the equipment there, you are getting it for far below meter prices.

So, from my math, he gets ROI on the chips in 3 months, and ROI on the entire facility in 9 months? That's literally the best investment of all time.

> There is no interest, as he was venture funded not debt funded.

Who is "he"? SpaceX has $20bn of debt and $9bn in "other financing" corresponding to "obligations related to certain AI infrastructure assets recorded as failed sale-leaseback transactions."

Edit: Page 122 of the S-1. They are paying SOFR + 0.75%. So around 5.5% on the $20B.

I'll keep the below for integrity sake:

Well, i'm sure SpaceX bought Xai using some kind of prefered share/debt financing, but that's not to say that XAI had the original debt financing.

We can never know what the exact details, and the exact financing is on this debt. Maybe it's tied to Elon's Tesla Shares, Maybe it's tied to a convertible, maybe it is actual "loans" from a bank. Even at $9b in debt, and you naivly assume they are paying 10% (Def not 20% as OP claimed), you are paying $900m a year, for the entirety of xAi. Including that in the calculations to rent out the entire compute is folly. Not only is 900M not directly attributed to c1, cause it's split between c1, c2 and all the training runs, but you can never verify the interest. And even then, one month of this deal pays for the whole year of interest expense.

So go ahead and lower my estimate by 10%... doesn't make a difference.

> We can never know what the exact details

If only there was some SEC filing available disclosing additional information about the 6-months $20bn bridge loan which was on the news four weeks ago…

oh, nice! thanks for this. This confirms spaceX has $20B at a SOFR + 0.75%. So around 5%-5.5%. Found on page 122 of the S-1. I assume they will retire all debt with the $50B raised from the IPO, plus have $30B to... dominate with starship. If starship is around $100m per launch right now, they can launch 300 ships with the IPO. or 30,000T in orbit.

> If starship is around $100m per launch right now, they can launch 300 ships with the IPO. or 30,000T in orbit.

Uh, starship is still a development program. There's 1 launch pad right now able to launch V3. No starship has flown with an actual live payload. The starlinks going out the PEZ dispenser are probably the only thing launching on it anytime soon.

Basically, Starship launching thousands of tons to orbit isn't constrained by money but by time.

we will see tomorrow, won't we :)

But you are right to call out the launch infrastructure as the true bottleneck. They have 3 pads currently under development. So in 6-9 months they'll have 4 operational pads.

Also, how do they heat tiles hold up? How fast can they catch, refurbish and relaunch is what remains.

I'm confident, and will be putting my money where my mouth is (By investing in the IPO) that they will have useful orbital payloads this year.

But for what payload?

Before Starlink we only send up like 1k ton of payload.

Starlink is the only reason why it jumped to 3k tons.

So SpaceX builds all of this to send its own stuff up which is basically only Starlink and in the future its own competition (amazon and leo). For something which is only consumed by 10 million customers right now and they increased the price for starlink which makes it even less competitive.

And Spacex has to send up Starlink every 5 years which keeps revenue low and Starlink is hard llinear growth as one Starlink Satelit can't handle that much traffic.

If his IPO makes all of that money, he will entertain us with funneling billions into a system which will then deliver a handful people onto mars if even.

A person on mars doesn't make money, it costs money.

Whats the goal here?

uh.. orbital data centers? Are we on the same page? 1.25B a month for half a gigawatt, with it rising up to 1g is the deal they just made with anthropic (total deal size 2-2.5B a month). Starship cost is probably something like (y = (400m - 20m*(0.85)^t + 20m, where t is times starship is launched. At 30 launches, they are close to their target of $20m. Falcon 9 has launched 649 times, they've resused the same booster 34 times. a single nvidia NVL72 rack's peak performance is around 135w so 1gw (1,000,000 kW /135 kW per rack‚ is 7,407. each rack weighs around 1.47 metric tons. so you have 7407/1.47t = 10,888.29t+ 15,243.606 (plus 15,243.606 is for an additional 140% for foldable radiator and solar panels... so 26,131.9t to orbit for 1gw of compute. each starship can do 100T, so 26,131.9t/100 gives us 261.32 starships. given the cost curve earlier:

Total Cost = ∫₀²⁶¹ (380 * 0.85ᵗ + 20) dt

  Total Cost = F(261) - F(0) 
             ≈ 5,220.00 - (-2,338.19) 
             ≈ 7,558.19

So $7.5B for the required tonnage to space. 3 million to $3.5 for each rack is 7407 * 3.5m = 25,924.5b. + 7,558.19 is 33b. if we can rent 1gw for $2-3b a month we get buyback in 13ish months? Literally best business model ever. if they last 5 years, each gw is worth $160-180B for the cost of $33B. once block 4 comes out with 200t... AGI ;)

Starship has launched today and hasn't finished everything it needs to even proof that it works reliable. For a Datacenter you need to put it higher than low orbit.

After that, you will need to start to even develoop server racks full of GPUs for space. You literlay need to engineere from scratch a cooling system which will be a few hundred square feed big. You need to be able to transfer massive amount of energy reliable from a small GPU rack to all of this area.

Than you need to send a few thousand of these constalations up there. Every single micrometeroid, sun storm, broken component means loosing a whole rack immediadlty.

Then you need to actually verify that you can send up all of that infrastructure in space and keep it alive there.

Then you have to assume a certain amount of lifetime which will be a lot shorter than on earth and you can't sell it of. These resources are gone.

To all of this cost, you will have to add latency, data syncronisation between racks has to be complelty engineered from scratch too. We talk about 100 of gigabits between these small constelations.

In the same timespan with a lot less money, you could already build a normal datacenter somewhere on the aquator or just as south in texas as possible. You can service it, you can upgrade it, no issues.

all of these are already solved with starlink besides the high orbit. The real problem is power.

>you could already build a normal datacenter somewhere

Can you? from where i'm sitting it's pretty illegal to build a datacenter in the united states. There has literally been hundreds of projects to build data centers around the US that have gotten canceled due to NIMBY's. Collosus itself is plagued by lawsuits.

All those things you listed aren't deal breakers, and maybe some earth based compute will be used but we simply don't have enough power, political will or the legal system to be able to push these data centers through.

So despite the fact that it is theoretically "Cheaper" to build a ground based system, and it will take 261 starship launches just for a single GW... The math is still mathin'. $33B to make $180B.

Generating your own electricity really isn't that much far below grid prices - you'd typically be looking at a central estimate of 15 years to get a return on investment for a large Combined Cooling and Power cogeneration setup.

But, crucially, there's a huge level of uncertainty. You're making bets on the relative cost of nat gas and grid power, both of which have historically shown extreme volatility over that sort of timescale.

The level of risk means that very few proposed schemes go ahead in full unless there's some other factor involved (lack of sufficient grid connectivity, availability of subsidies).

> You're making bets on the relative cost of nat gas and grid power

nat gas is extremely cheap to get options for, so no.. you are not.

> Also, they are only renting out colosus 1 ($10B), not colosus II ($18B).

The news from the S1 is that they're renting both (see OP).

yes, it says they will be paying for "additional capacity" at a reduced rate as it becomes availble in May and June.

Essentially, they are using most of C2 for Grok5. That training run is coming to an End, and they will be leasing more capacity. So taht 1.25b per month will go up to around $1.5B-$2B per month as they finish grok 5.

Edit: from cofounder of Anthropic: "will be scaling up on GB200 capacity in Colossus 2 throughout June." https://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375

So the 1.25B is for c1, and the revenue will scale into c2. No idea how much scale, but c2 is almost double the compute? So potentially $3b a month, but probably closer to $2.5B since they get a discount.

That depreciation it too high in practice.

5 year old H100s are now completed depreciated but are being rented out at higher rates than when they were new.

> Who is going to rent the GPUs then?

I'd LOVE a way to be on the other side of that bet.

If only there was another way outside of buying into all the other Elon risks associated with SpaceX.

I am very skeptical that musk is 10-20% interest. I would guess closer to 5.

That assumes they are renting out the whole capacity. Have you seen anything suggesting that's the case?

Anthropic is renting the whole capacity (of one of the colossus), it was a big part of the announcement.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-to-rent-all-ai-capa...

I don't know about Cursor.

Yeah one of them but the costs in the calculation are for two of them.

We all know very little of that is gonna materialize long term.

Reality is that this is all to show some more (theorical) revenue and will be scrapped 6 months from now.

At the time of the announcement IIRC the deal was only for Colossus 1. Is Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 new?

At the time the consensus narrative was that SpaceX no longer needed Colossus 1 for Grok and that was why it could be leased to Anthropic while Colossus 2 would handle Grok training and inference. Does Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 change this?

They are. This is from their "Chief Compute Officer".

https://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375

Right. This compute still being powered by an illegal amount of gas turbines in a residential neighborhood?

Claude is eating so much compute, the threat of that power being tuned down by lawsuit (rightfully) is worth the risk to Anthropic in the short-term. Instead of declaring "bubble", I'm just going to say that's so crazy.

Colossus 1 is in an industrial area, next door to a grid scale natural gas power plant. One that's fully operational.

Then why do they keep getting sued, then going one state over and running the same playbook that got them sued in the previous state?

https://naacp.org/articles/naacp-sues-xai-illegal-pollution-...

Or SpaceX is absorbing the risk should that power be turned off... still morally shitty but not obviously economically so.

has anyone done the math on: 1. cost to build out and run the data centers 2. cost of compute (hardware and energy) 3. depreciation of legacy GPU and thus value at the end of 3 years.

And then compare the $45B revenue from Anthropic to see if it's mostly break even or if one of Anthropic/SpaceX came out ahead on the contract.

Maybe it is a win/win. Anthropic gets desperately needed compute at a fair price. SpaceXAI sells compute at a fair price and gets desperately needed revenues.

Tesla loses out on that revenue since it was their chips to begin with, right?

XAi purchased Teslas allocation of GPUs, in exchange for Tesla purchasing XAis allocation of GPUs at a later date. This they claim was done because Tesla didnt have their datacentre ready to receive those gpus at that time. I dont see how or who was robbed here.

No. xAI is buying Nvidia, not using Tesla chips.

SpaceX is already indicating their strategy on this, because they’re renting their last-gen data center to Anthropic and keeping the current-gen data center for themselves. Rinse and repeat.

It's same gen.

It has $25 billion on AI cap expenditure in the S1. So generally looks like a solid deal for SpaceX.

Well Colossus 1 has 230k GPUs, including 30k GB200s and Colossus 2 has 550k GB200s & GB300s.

So my guess on costs would be like ~$10B for Colossus 1, and Colossus 2 would be like ~20b.

a GB300 rack is like 5-6 million so seems a bit low.

Yeah, maybe these aren't good guesses. I was basing it off CapEx and Elon's tweet about them. Maybe C2 isn't completely filled yet.

Ed Zitron https://www.wheresyoured.at/ has done the math, and it's pretty bleak. His somewhat voluminous rantings contain raw figures on investments, data centre builds, energy availability and depreciation.

He believes Oracle has already signed it's own death warrant, and that Meta is close behind. MS, Amazon and Google have massive revenue streams to sustain them, but looking at the numbers, each has to earn from AI the equivalent of their existing real revenue. I can't see that happening.

And he believes from multiple perspectives of the data that Nvidea are either massively overstating their GPU sales, or that there are warehouses full of unused GPUs. There just isn't the energy capacity to run them all, let alone data centres to put them in.

> Ed Zitron

His math is wrong though. He still claims H100s are worthless but in fact they are worth more now than when they were new.

And everything I've read from him is just.. weird? Like he has an anti-AI agenda and he interpreters everything through that?

Look at his latest public piece: https://www.wheresyoured.at/where-are-all-the-data-centers/

He is complaining that there are no 1GW+ data centers, with evidence like this:

> For example, CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos reported in October 2025 that Amazon’s Indiana-based (allegedly) 2.2GW Project Rainier data center was “operational,” but only seven out of a planned 30 buildings were actually operational, and her comment of “with two more campuses [of indeterminate capacity] underway.” This comment was buried two videos and 600 words into a piece that declared the data center was “now operational,” with the express intent of making you think the whole thing was operational.

But if you read the report that "buried" comment is far from buried - the whole thing is about how it is still under construction!

Of course 1GW data centers don't all come online at once! You get them online in the parts you can as soon as you can!

> Ed Zitron https://www.wheresyoured.at/ has done the math, and it's pretty bleak.

Ed Zitron is constantly wrong and writes like a child having a tantrum, I don’t understand why you take him seriously?

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost...

From a previous comment of mine – the quotes are all from a single article:

He comes across as just a ludicrously unpleasant, spite-filled person.

> I'm fucking tired of having to write this sentence.

> I am so very bored of having this conversation

> I don't care about this number!

> Shut the fuck up!

> This isn't the early days of shit.

> Didn't we just talk about this? Fine, fine.

> $3.25 billion a quarter is absolutely pathetic.

> This isn’t real business! Sorry!

> He said in one of his stupid and boring blogs that

> This man is full of shit! Hey, tech media people reading this — your readers hate this shit! Stop printing it! Stop it!

> It's here where I'm going to choose to scream.

> Dario Amodei — much like Sam Altman — is a liar, a crook, a carnival barker and a charlatan, and the things he promises are equal parts ridiculous and offensive.

> Why are we humoring these oafs?

> Despite Newton's fawning praise

> Nobody talks like this! This isn’t how human beings sound! I don’t like reading it!

> Ewww.

> I'm sorry, I know I sound like a hater, and perhaps I am, but this shit doesn't impress me even a little.

> I know, I know, I'm a hater, I'm a pessimist, a cynic, but I need you to fucking listen to me: everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous

> expensive, stupid, irksome, quasi-useless new product

> I know this has been a rant-filled newsletter, but I'm so tired of being told to be excited about this warmed-up dogshit.

> I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.

> I'm tired of the delusion. I'm tired of being forced to take these men seriously.

When I read this kind of thing, it’s very apparent that this is being driven entirely by spite not insight. He’s just so angry about everything. There are 57 exclamation marks in this article!

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085885#43086361

Pay too much attention to this kind of thing and it will poison your mind.

In the 90s we had people talking like this about The Internet. They're all over on FB now, with a detour in between to say stuff like "my isp can track me!?"

If this doesn't completely destroy any benefit of doubt that people have in Dario, I don't know what to say. The guy has been speaking out of both sides of his mouth since the foundation of Anth. Over and over he repeated that Anth's investment in compute would not be reckless; it would represent sanity and be proportional to growth. Over and over Anth told users that the models weren't nerfed overnight, we were just prompting wrong. As expected, Anth simply failed to make the early compute deals when everyone else did, and are now forced to be on the wrong end of price gouging just to keep pace. Actions speak louder than words.

I don't see how this follows at all?

It's true that Anthropic didn't buy as much compute as OpenAI. But OpenAI's compute purchases are one of the largest investments in human history.

It's also true that they are now scrambling for compute, and might be paying more than OpenAI paid. But now they have the revenue to justify it!

To me it is the opposite of "speaking out of both sides of his mouth" - he's been consistent in his "we won't be reckless in buying compute too far ahead of demand" message.

I don't think this is right. Anthropic's growth in the last 6 months went hockey stick in quite an unexpected way (eclipsing OpenAI), so they've done what is sensible - they've increased their compute spend. I don't know if what they're buying from SpaceX is good value, I think there's plenty of reasons to think they got a fine deal. X AI failed. Everyone left. So SpaceX is sitting with a bunch of empty server farms. Yes, Anthropic are desparate for compute, but SpaceX are desparate to IPO a company with double digit billion dollar revenue for $2T so I think there's good reason that this deal represents reasonable value.

skeptical of someone who talks about anthropic enough that they think 'anth' is a reasonable abbreviation lol. maybe youre not wrong but youre definitely biased and not coming to conclusions in a rational way

How does taking a shortcut on the name indicate bias? Or, are people similarly biased when they talk about msft, nv, fb, OAI, ...?

So you're complaining that his actions matched his words?

He didn't make compute deals until he saw the growth necessary to justify them. As a result, they're paying over-the-odds compared to if they'd have make deals earlier. Maybe that was a poor business decision, but I'm not sure how it represents speaking out of "both sides of his mouth"? Sounds like he was honest.

That's one of the things he said. He also said the exact opposite.

He repeatedly says: if we’re off by a year, we go bankrupt.

In nearly the same breath, he said AGI is 2 years away.

He's operating like AGI is imminent but not saying it. And he's operating like AGI is a decade away, yet buying tons of compute at gouged prices.

Someone expecting imminent AGI would fear being outscaled, because if they don't win on energy/compute, they lose.

So his revealed beliefs are more like: ~10% chance AGI in 1–3 years ~40 chance 4–8 years

Even if we consider what they pay for colossus high (I've no idea, I haven't looked at the numbers), wouldn't this a bit be different from "investing in infrastructure"? They're not building the DC themselves, they're just renting, they can scale down to 0 anytime and not have pressure to recover costs, they don't have debt on the HW, etc.

At least from how it's described in the filing, it sounds like they're committed through 2029 on the deal with SpaceX. So they can't just pull out without a massive lawsuit from SpaceX.

Actually, what the filing says is:

"Pursuant to these agreements, the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee. The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice."

It’s also interesting that Cursor (that spacex is acquiring ) also just announced yesterday they are training in colossus.

So who’s using it? Is spacex just renting out parts of their data center? Or is cursor done done?

$45 billion for a 3 year rental.

What would be interesting to know how much did it cost xAI to build it ? Ai says between $18-$40 billion to just build, without running cost, but no idea how close to reality this is.

The AI row of the capex table in the S-1 should be a pretty close approximation.

Nobody pays MSRP at that scale

Given global demand and that they were late to the order party, they probably paid more lol

Yes and no. They paid what everyone else pays for those gpus. NVIDIA make the profit and leaves crumbs for the rest. For other components they paid less, but since the gpus are the majority of the cost…

Closer to 18b than 40. Running costs are 1-2b a year.

More like $25 billion since 2025, with $7 billion of spending in the past 3 months. Look at page 22 of the filing.

Anthropic is getting capacity from Colossus 1 not Colossus 2 it sounded like. The initial colossus capex was under $5B, making that an even more astounding payoff.

Edit: S1 states both are being leased so the 20-25B initial investment probably more relevant

The S-1 states that it gets capacity from both Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.

... and a sign Anthropic couldn't find enough compute anywhere else, so they had to bite the bullet. Interesting.

how much did SpaceX / xAI pay for these GPUs? After 3 years they'll probably be mostly deprecated.

Are GPUs from 3 years ago being deprecated today?

I thought I saw a report from someone at Google saying that they were still running 7+ year old hardware because of demand. Even if it is not state of the art, if it generates more than the electricity costs, keep it running until it dies.

Efficiency gains have been so intense that old hardware is still viable for serving brand new mid size models.

Likely legacy products are running on the old chips because the newer generations are capacity constrained.

Hetzner is still running and selling Haswell Xeons and GTX-1080s that are 10+ years old.

Definitely not silicon waste the second something faster arrives. There's still a world beyond cutting edge LLM slop after all.

And how many of them were diverted from Tesla?

Pretty sure that Tesla didn't use Colossus. Tesla used Cortex 1 and Cortex 2 which are at the Gigafactory in Austin.

Tesla famously never got to use them https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/06/elon-musk-is-diverting-...

The article says: In December, an internal Nvidia memo seen by CNBC said, “Elon prioritizing X H100 GPU cluster deployment at X versus Tesla by redirecting 12k of shipped H100 GPUs originally slated for Tesla to X instead. In exchange, original X orders of 12k H100 slated for Jan and June to be redirected to Tesla.”

The whole AI world really is completely circular spending where every one loses money along the way. The only one really making any money is Nvidia.

The most honest memory cartel is reporting stupid profit numbers too!

>Samsung chip profit jumps almost 50-fold; supply shortage to worsen in 2027

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r...

>South Korean April exports rise 48.0% y/y as chip boom extends

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-april...

To the point where the big memory makers are suddenly trillion AI-dollar companies.

There is a lot of money coming in from industry, actually an exponentially increasing amount of money - money that would otherwise go to employees is now going to AI companies. There are more startups than you can shake a stick at that are basically creating virtual workers for xyz task and selling them to companies. All that money is funneling back to AI companies. It's a gold rush and employee salaries are the gold.

How is SpaceX not making money?

Total investment is 20-40B, rent to Anthropic for 45B over 3 years.

Anthropic is also profitable now.

Anthropic is not profitable and does not expect to be revenue even until 2028. They are just losing less billions per year than everyone else.

As always, free cash flow and unit economics are more interesting than net profit.

By which metrics Anthropic is making a lot of money.

how exactly can you assume they have unit profitability

Plenty of analysis on this point, the inputs are not secret. Check out Semianalysis for example.

They have something like 70% margin on inference.

They had 40% margin on inference in 2025.

https://archive.is/aKFYZ

You can quibble about the exact numbers, but I think it’s fairly clear at this point that inference is profitable with decent margins. Like you say, unit economics are more interesting than the profitability of the company as a whole.

so speculation from a semiconductor website. that's incredibly likely to be wrong

I think you should do a bit of research and come back once you have fixed your knowledge gaps.

what research? it's private and there is large incentive to lie until ipo

We will see once Anthropic releases their S-1 too this summer.

Except that they're loaning a bunch of money to their "customers" to "buy" their products. It's still really circular.

This thing is going to explode. From this I have to imagine OpenAIs numbers are also going to be much worse than people imagine / what has been shared.

Hot take: the US government should invest money into AI. This is why this is happening. China is doing it.

If my napkin math is right, Anthropic will make SpaceX/Xai whole on the initial investment for Colossus 2 + operating costs + a small profit by the end of the contract. No massive profits, although they may be able to fudge accounting to make it seem that way.

You're ignoring all the depreciation costs.

Wow! 3 years is an eternity at this level.

Anthropic can cancel the deal on short notice: “The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.”

Sure, either side could cancel. But Anthropic needs compute, and they found it in SpaceXAI. Why would they cancel the deal unless they don't need more compute or if they could get compute for less elsewhere (but where would that be realistically)?

Anthropic have deals in place to get another 5GW from Amazon, and 5GW from Google, just that it is not available yet. For comparison the total of Colossus #1 and #2 is 1GW

Everyone laughed at Allbirds getting into the business of selling compute.

The reason people laugh at Allbirds is that they don't have the money or expertise to build a competitive offering.

They certainly have some big shoes to fill. But I'm glad they didn't die with their boots on, and got their foot in the door at this new opportunity. It certainly didn't help that they were running on a shoestring budget.

And when Anthropic runs Claude on Allbirds' GPUs they'll give it a SOLE.md.

I see what you did there.

A shocking number of the neocloud teams have exactly one skill set: raising money.

A few of them also have locked in power agreements.

Almost none of them have the expertise to build anything. Some of them are even outsourcing that to geezer tech and consulting shops.

It's not going to go well.

Whoa. I've said before, but I think Dario severely underestimated the coming demand and ensuing need for compute, and would need to pay through the nose when the crunch hit. I suspect that Google deal also worked out better for Google. This data point supports that view.

While Altman got laughed out of the room as a "podcasting bro" asking for trillions in investment in compute, Dario was going on about how difficult it is to forecast capacity on the Dwarkesh podcast. Seems like a major unforced error on Dario's part. What I cannot understand is how they both came to such different perspectives; my best guess is that ChatGPT has so much more traffic that OpenAI could gauge the trends much better.

This won't hurt Anthropic long-term of course, but this won't look great on that balance sheet, that too right around the time they plan to IPO.

They have different personalities. I can only imagine Altman wants to stay on top of the chaos, and believes he will come out ahead whatever happens, while Dario is trying to stay realistic and mitigate worst-case scenarios.

Being drowned in demand and scrambling for compute because you’re more successful than anticipated is a better problem than the other way around.

Oh, for sure it could be much worse -- they could have been in xAI's place! ;-)

But while this is a "good problem to have" it would have been an even better problem to avoid in the first place, because it seemed avoidable.

Now, I'm totally armchair billionaire-CEO-ing here, but anybody with any compute has been so obviously capacity constrained for so many quarters all the while scrambling like mad and spending obscene amounts of money to acquire even more compute. With lead times of 2 - 3 years, something Dario explicitly called out on Dwarkesh, it seemed prudent to acquire first, ask questions later. Worst case, they could have rented any extra capacity out, like Elon is doing!

Outsiders are reasonably questioning this mania but Dario, as one of the biggest believers in AI and even AGI, showing hesitancy seems uncharacteristic. I wonder if this is one of those rare cases where it would have been better to drink his own Kool Aid!

Anthropic got somewhat lucky that Elon wanted to stick it to Altman, but boy, even then he drove a hard bargain.

> Worst case, they could have rented any extra capacity out, like Elon is doing!

Worst case there wouldn't be anyone interested in renting it either, they would have tens of billions of useless data centers fastly losing value.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com