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SpaceX S-1

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Re: SpaceX S-1

#221
post #43

"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 1.2…

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.

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.

Re: SpaceX S-1

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: SpaceX S-1

#223
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX would be an interesting IPO without XAI. It is hemorrhaging money and is in what, 6th place in the AI race while hemorrhaging X subscribers every month. Theoretically the company could focus on what is profitable and be strong fundamental company, but this is Elon we are talking about he is going to do whatever he wants to do.

To be honest, it could be one with XAi too. Im no fan of Musk and Grok but the deal with Anthropic pointed out by other contributors isn't nothing. And I don't think SpaceX losing money at this stage isn't quite the problem that people think it is -- as someone who as worked at companies losing money and then going on to make quite a bit. Revenue growth is there. The issue is that none of this is really worth $2T now…

The deal with Anthropic, even if good, doesn’t seem repeatable.

Right now, quite a few companies are discovering that the can turn inference capacity into revenue. Anthropic also can turn inference capacity into happy customers and mindshare, and they can turn lack of inference capacity into sad customers that might jump ship to OpenAI. And Anthropic wants to IPO, and they want to be as close to #1 as possible. And this whole phenomenon, industry-wide, has caused the demand for fancy chips to outstrip supply. Two years ago, DRAM was a low-margin industry, and now it’s not. If you bought a 5090 when it came out for around MSRP, you could resell it now at a healthy profit.

xAI appears to have effectively resold their datacenter at a healthy profit.

Sure, maybe xAI will try to bet that they can build another datacenter and sell/lease it at a healthy profit, but lots of players are trying to make that bet (bottlenecked by power and chip availability). And those bets could easily fail. And the players who don’t have adequate competition (SK Hynix, Micron, TSMC, etc) are going to jack up prices to try to capture more of the upside. And players like DeepSeek and Alibaba want to drive down the need for FLOPs and DRAM, because they don’t have enough and because they have a shortage of those but they don’t have a shortage of excellent AI development talent.

Oh, and China will build its datacenters on the ground, backed by more solar capacity than SpaceX can even dream of launching, and those datacenters will compete. And CXMT and Huawei will do everything in their power to ramp their own production, and SpaceX is not about to get first dibs.

On the bright side, Tesla’s AI5 finally taped out, and SpaceX will surely get some of those.

So maybe SpaceX will find $20bn of GPUs that they can resell or lease for $40bn of discounted revenue, but they could just as easily not find those GPUs or they might only get $17bn of discounted revenue and lose money on the whole affair.

Re: SpaceX S-1

#224
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: SpaceX S-1

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: SpaceX S-1

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but only if its added before the index funds. Let's just hope that the nasdaq and the other markets just don't take spacex (Nasdaq is literally bending its rules to accodomate SpaceX) The worst thing is that we don't even have a say in all of this and chances are most likely that its gonna IPO and get listed on the index funds soon and once it gets into Index funds, a lot of collateral damage might happen. I must…

Total market cap of NASDAQ 100 (QQQ) is $40 trillion, SpaceX joining that and immediately going to zero would be a 5% drop, big but not the worst we've seen.

I think if SpaceX were to drop dramatically it may spook the market and lead to a lot of the NASDAQ 100 pulling back.

Re: SpaceX S-1

#227
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: SpaceX S-1

#228
post #3

Crazy this company will IPO for >1B with such bad financials! That said, Starlink seems to be a real cash machine, not as good as ads but enough to support AI bets. 2025: - Revenue: $18.7B, up from $14.0B in 2024 - Operating loss: -$2.6B - Net loss: -$4.9B - Adjusted EBITDA: $6.6B - Operating cash flow: $6.8B - Capex: $20.7B Segment breakdown: - Starlink / Connectivity: $11.4B revenue, $4.4B operating income, $7.2B a…

What is the best way to hedge against this turkey being included in my index funds?

I have been thinking the same thing. I don’t want this turd in my index funds.

Re: SpaceX S-1

#229
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers overall are worse than I expected. I can't believe Serious People are talking about putting this in the market at a trilly. > Starlink seems to be a real cash machine It has been said more than once that Starlink financials cannot be analyzed apart from SpaceX financials. Very easy to move the launch costs from one entity to the other depending on whether it is more beneficial to show more revenue for Spa…

Looks like it's gonna be closer to 2 trilly

What is a realistic scenario for how this plays out? After index funds mechanically buy SpaceX, the insider lock out expires and they all sell - how low does SpaceX go? Will reality hit and a $2T valuation instantly drops to a more "reasonable" value for an unprofitable company? Will it stay in the clouds?

Tesla seems in a world of hurt unless robots start making space centers from moon rocks, yet that is also defying gravity.

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