The (optimistic?) take is that xAI is genuinely better at building datacenters at scale than anyone else, and the freedom to use Nat Gas as the primary energy source allows them to have lower marginal costs.

The (pessimistic?) take is that they have loads of idle GPUs and want to get some revenue out of them rather than none. Compare this to OpenAI/Anthropic where every token used by a consumer has to compete with enterprise spenders, and there’s not enough to go around for everyone.

It’s basically a clearance sale, is the theory.

They do, yes.

There are various difficulties with renting GPUs, especially if your setup is very custom.

The competitor would have to port their training systems to your specific network architecture, system design, rdma Vs ethernet vs infiniband Vs nvlink etc.

Getting it running might not be too hard, but getting it running efficiently and making good use of all those flops will require considerable human effort and wall time.

Add that to the fact most frontier labs seem to have a single huge training run - and to my knowledge nobody has figured out how to distribute that training run between data centers effectively.