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Comment by Sol- | Hacker News Reader

xAI has shown this to be quite lucrative. And it seems to even make some sense - if the contract can be ended on relatively short notice, you basically have the capacity on stand-by if you ever need it yourself (accumulating GPUs is not trivial), but can monetize it if you don't need it.

Though it's probably a bad sign generally that you can't capitalize on all the GPUs you've acquired.

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>xAI has shown this to be quite lucrative.

The demand is likely short term till the renter can ramp up their own centres/find better deals.

> xAI has shown this to be quite lucrative

Come back when you have actual numbers on dollars spent, interest rates and the time spent.

To be fair to meta, they've been running data centers for almost two decades now, so they'd be in a different position to XAI.

> (accumulating GPUs is not trivial)

Also like accumulating milk rather than gold.

A approximate failure rate I have been able to find is: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Which would imply 42% loss over 5 years if linear attrition at 10% failure rate per gpu year.

(((1-(148+72+19+17+6)÷16 384)^(1÷54))^(365)

Dunno how many faults are repairable in practice. The failure rates of CPUs were alot lower for comparison.

Newer generations are supposed to be more reliable. You're also not counting warranty replacement.

> xAI has shown this to be quite lucrative

How do you know this? Have they released any numbers?

I think the SpaceX IPO showed them to rent the clusters for billions a month

That doesn't mean they're lucrative, though. They cost tens of billions to build and huge sums to run. Even if I believe that they are now running profitably, that doesn't mean they're "quite lucrative" overall.

SpaceX's numbers show xAI increasing its losses over time. In 2025, xAI lost $6.4 billion on $3.2 billion. In 2026, xAI posted a $2.47 billion operating loss in the first quarter alone.

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