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Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
241–250 of 1001 posts
Re: Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
#242“If we fail to deliver access to the committed amount of GPUs by September 30, 2026, then following a one-month grace period, Google may immediately terminate the agreement or accept the number of GPUs provided, with a corresponding pro rata reduction in the monthly fees. After December 31, 2026, the agreement may be terminated by either party upon 90 days' notice.” https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000…
Either that or SpaceX is permanently turning xAI's assets into a neocloud because xAI itself has no traction. The whole thing looks rather desperate. I wonder what SpaceX's margins are on these contracts.
> I wonder what SpaceX's margins are on these contracts.
In the Anthropic deal they have to be negative; Anthropic's announced higher margins during the deal.
Re: Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
#243380 dollars per second... Good to know I could afford my own data center for an appreciable fraction of a minute.
plus $473 per second from Anthropic > As part of that deal, Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through 2029 to rent all the available compute from its Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee, that xAI — now part of SpaceX — originally built for its own artificial intelligence efforts. I don't get why SpaceX is going public. But anyway, well played, the whole crypto mining that dried out GPU…
> I don't get why SpaceX is going public.
Liquidity for investors. They raised everything they could from private markets, government contract, debt, the remaining source of financing is from the public
Re: Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
#244Because SpaceX has excess capacity.
Re: Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
SpaceX has recently started pitching itself as an orbital datacenter company. If you buy into that business model (or pretend to), it makes sense for SpaceX to start selling compute early. Their "earthside compute" clients of today are "skyside compute" clients of tomorrow. A part of Musk's old pitch for Starlink was: space-based solar makes perfect sense for powering space assets, and no sense whatsoever for powerin…
Why would it ever be more economical to put datacenters in orbit, rather than on some dirt cheap land?
That won’t ever be the case. It’s pure grift. There is literally no other actual reason
Re: Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
#246Cloud companies were made to sell others compute. Now, one is buying billions of compute from SpaceX, a rocket company. That sounds so backwards lol.
Great work by Musk and his companies to be in a position to sell billions to cloud vendors. I'd have probably missed that opportunity while trying to build great rockets or AI models.
Re: Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grok is just DOA. No need to beat a dead horse. Even Musk got that thus the reason why he is renting the stuff it planned for Grok.
Grok has plenty of "non-woke AI" cred which will make it a preferred choice for lots of government-side and politically sensitive workloads.
What do you think the term woke actually means?
Re: Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can anyone explain how the thermals will work? One of the biggest challenges on Earth is cooling the data center, and it's at least as challenging in space.
The earthbound equivalent would be strapping each chassis to the back of a dedicated solar panel and having the panel double as a giant heat sink. The problem is that doesn't work on the surface due to (at least) rain, the day/night cycle, and the cost of real estate.
Isn't a solar panel going to be a poor heatsink, though? It's flat, and thus has relatively small surface area compared to its size.
Re: Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
#249Google renting infra from xAI, I did not see that coming. My understanding of what computers are doing, what companies are doing and what governments are doing seems to be getting worse day by day.
> Google renting infra from xAI, I did not see that coming. Actually that seems to be fairly logical? Hardware is what xAI has , and it's in great demand. So sell what makes you money. The real story here is that that xAI hardware is going to be running Gemini and not Grok. Which is to say: Grok basically failed as a frontier AI and they need to pivot to a business model which makes money. Obviously not everything Mu…
You make it sound like they’ve given up on Grok, which I don’t think is accurate. I think it’s been mentioned the Grok 5 1.5T model is currently training on Colossus 2. And their recent deal with cursor is part of being able to eventually compete with Anthropic for agentic coding.
Re: Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really strange... if the goal is to go to mars, you probably need robots, those need intelligence -> ai. It fits pretty well, especially because you want to own all the core technologies as a company.
Why 4-5 companies instead of one then? I thought the goal of SpaceX was to get to Mars, why does xAI need to have that same goal? Or he didn't think xAI was suitable for that goal, then changed his mind so merged the companies?
The stated goal is to "go to mars", the real goal is to make money.
He sold his failing but hype business to his soon-to-IPO successful but kinda boring business.
It's a way of laundering the debt and dumping into investors as he pitted different indexes against each other to force his way into one of them, and have people's 401k buy into them. Its a ton of money.
I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla is bought into spaceX in the future.