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.

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.

I mean... I don't really expect anything since Gemma 4 was released recently

bro I read this, opened the keynote stream and the presenter said "Agents in Gemini" HAHAHAHA

which harness are you using? pi? opencode?

It is really telling when people say that. It’s clear they think the job of harness development is done by selecting the agent environment.

Akshually, they said "harness," and not "test harness."

There's no particular reason "agent harness" can't have practically the same definition, substituting test-specific concepts for agent-specific ones.

Harness: a piece of equipment with straps and belts, used to control or hold in place a person, animal, or object.

So yes the generel meaning applies to test setup and running and also to the agent cli which is the harness for the model.

No, an agent cli is no harness. You have to provide a harness for an agent by yourself, otherwise it will run free. Which is called vibe coding. Free as you wish, without any harness.

An agent cli provides a sandbox, with permission systems and auto command classifiers. That’s part of the harness.

lol pi doesn’t

May I ask about your trust issue regarding Google models?

Is it about quality issues (lack of guardrails, agent runs dangerous commands)? I have seen first-hand Gemini-cli going out of the project directory and using my home directory as a work area.

Or is it about terms of service?

Or other concerns?

Quality. They are too dumb.

And the lack of ease of use.

You're free to fight the terminology if you want (I did at first too), but the zeitgeist has chosen a meaning that disagrees with you, so people will see you as being deliberately obtuse and unpleasant when you fight back.

Learning when to let go is an incredibly important skill that I have learned way too late in life.

Yeah but as a European I think we took the wrong route. I am from Italy, and until 2001 we had 5 years undergraduate programs only. We then chose to do 3 + 2, but we should have gone with 4 + 1 years instead.

I have a BSc in Computer Engineering and I'm finishing a MSc in Computer Science. The MSc has been useless other than for being able to start doing research. I could have learned additional things in 1 more year, without repeating most of the knowledge in the other year, and then start the PhD directly. Instead I did a MSc where for 1 year I mostly repeated old topics before starting working on really new things.

I think Masters should be highly specialized for people that after a Bachelor start to work but want additional knowledge for their position.

TLDR: 4 years Bachelors -> 4 years PhD is the correct route in my opinion. We messed up in Europe

But nobody has 4 + 4? The traditional system was in Europe 5 + 3, now we mostly have 3/4 + 2 + 3 (Europe) or 3 + 1 + 3 (UK/Ireland).

I don't have a lot of experience with the US system, but from my experience after 3/4 years newly minted postgrads are probably not yet ready to knowingly commit to 5 years of specialised training. European-style MA/MSc's often feel "useless" because they actually help people switch course and find a new footing. However, good master's programmes are either flexible enough for advanced students to take more specialised modules or have high demands to begin with.

From what I understood they admitted fewer people. The professors are worried about not having funds so they aren't hiring as much

Thanks.

The head of MIT needs to be clearer about that. It may be inconceivable at his level to say that fewer people would apply.

In the US, school enrollment is declining due to declining birth rates.[1] That's hitting elementary schools now, but hasn't hit colleges yet. It will in a few years, of course.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/declining-public-school-e...

In the comments many people are complaining that it's macos only, but one of the hosts say that they didn't just use screenshots to use the UI, but accessibility settings to see things hidden from what is visible on screen. So here's the reason... seems like that Apple's focus on accessibility will pay off and not help just people with disabilities.

Wonder if that's also the case for web-based UI like Spotify, or if the accessibility APIs are only useful for native applications.

as @goldenarm said just below here, I can't use Gemini Flash for how much it hallucinates. Gemini pro is quite speedy so I am good with using that. On another note, I really like deepseekv4 flash

This administration is so hilarious. Every day looks like an episode from The Office

Maybe the mirror universe The Office, anyway.

Also what’s the point of releasing these files? At best it makes them look incompetent.

Flooding the zone, as they say. More tragic than hilarious

At least they're flooding the zone with something moderately entertaining shit.

Panem et circenses, am I right? The American population is so cooked, but hey, at least they’re having fun!

Kind of tragic for all the kids who died after US Aid, the Iranian school kids, the detained children of "illegals", the victims of child molestation etc...

your local library rents Nintendo Switch games???

I'm not sure where the original poster is from, but where I'm at (Canada) my local library has a large gaming collection, including Switch 2 games. The bigger games you have to wait a while on the hold list, but there are plenty of games available at any time, for free.

I live in Santa Clara County in northern California, the county library has Playstation, XBox and Switch games for rent (you do have to take either a box or a slip of paper to the counter to get the physical game - they do not leave them out like movies.) There is a long wait period for the latest releases. I think I had to wait almost a year for The 100 Line: Last Defense Academy, and it took me two rental periods of 21+ days to play through it.