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"in May 2026, we entered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI research and development public benefit corporation, with respec
by impulser_ 5mo ago
"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 1.25 billion per month to serve Claude in their data centers. That's more revenue than Starlink. In fact that's their largest revenue stream lol.
- gjsman-1000 5mo ago$45 billion for a 3 year rental.
- thetrb 5mo agohow much did SpaceX / xAI pay for these GPUs? After 3 years they'll probably be mostly deprecated.
- electriclove 5mo agoAre GPUs from 3 years ago being deprecated today?
- 3eb7988a1663 5mo agoI 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.
- WarmWash 5mo agoEfficiency gains have been so intense that old hardware is still viable for serving brand new mid size models.
- throwaway85825 5mo agoLikely legacy products are running on the old chips because the newer generations are capacity constrained.
- dopa42365 5mo agoHetzner is still running and selling Haswell Xeons and GTX-1080s that are 10+ years old. Definitely not silicon waste the second something faster arrives. There's still a world beyond cutting edge LLM slop after all.
- moogly 5mo agoAnd how many of them were diverted from Tesla?
- electriclove 5mo agoPretty sure that Tesla didn't use Colossus. Tesla used Cortex 1 and Cortex 2 which are at the Gigafactory in Austin.
- moogly 5mo agoTesla famously never got to use them https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/06/elon-musk-is-diverting-teslas-gpus-to-x-xai-nvidia-emails-say/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/06/elon-musk-is-diverting-...
- electriclove 5mo agoThe article says: In December, an internal Nvidia memo seen by CNBC said, “Elon prioritizing X H100 GPU cluster deployment at X versus Tesla by redirecting 12k of shipped H100 GPUs originally slated for Tesla to X instead. In exchange, original X orders of 12k H100 slated for Jan and June to be redirected to Tesla.”
- TheAlchemist 5mo agoWhat would be interesting to know how much did it cost xAI to build it ? Ai says between $18-$40 billion to just build, without running cost, but no idea how close to reality this is.
- pbmango 5mo agoAnthropic is getting capacity from Colossus 1 not Colossus 2 it sounded like. The initial colossus capex was under $5B, making that an even more astounding payoff. Edit: S1 states both are being leased so the 20-25B initial investment probably more relevant
- gjsman-1000 5mo ago... and a sign Anthropic couldn't find enough compute anywhere else, so they had to bite the bullet. Interesting.
- TheAlchemist 5mo agoThe S-1 states that it gets capacity from both Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.
- btian 5mo agoCloser to 18b than 40. Running costs are 1-2b a year.
- tristanj 5mo agoMore like $25 billion since 2025, with $7 billion of spending in the past 3 months. Look at page 22 of the filing.
- jsnell 5mo agoThe AI row of the capex table in the S-1 should be a pretty close approximation.
- pianoben 5mo agoNobody pays MSRP at that scale
- LarsDu88 5mo agoWow! 3 years is an eternity at this level.
- nolta 5mo agoAnthropic can cancel the deal on short notice: “The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.”
- electriclove 5mo agoSure, either side could cancel. But Anthropic needs compute, and they found it in SpaceXAI. Why would they cancel the deal unless they don't need more compute or if they could get compute for less elsewhere (but where would that be realistically)?
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo agoAnthropic have deals in place to get another 5GW from Amazon, and 5GW from Google, just that it is not available yet. For comparison the total of Colossus #1 and #2 is 1GW
- baron816 5mo agoEveryone laughed at Allbirds getting into the business of selling compute.
- nickff 5mo agoThe reason people laugh at Allbirds is that they don't have the money or expertise to build a competitive offering.
- kube-system 5mo agoThey certainly have some big shoes to fill. But I'm glad they didn't die with their boots on, and got their foot in the door at this new opportunity. It certainly didn't help that they were running on a shoestring budget.
- aaronbrethorst 5mo agoI see what you did there.
- keeda 5mo agoAnd when Anthropic runs Claude on Allbirds' GPUs they'll give it a SOLE.md.
- foobiekr 5mo agoA shocking number of the neocloud teams have exactly one skill set: raising money. A few of them also have locked in power agreements. Almost none of them have the expertise to build anything. Some of them are even outsourcing that to geezer tech and consulting shops. It's not going to go well.
- neosat 5mo agohas 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.
- impulser_ 5mo agoWell Colossus 1 has 230k GPUs, including 30k GB200s and Colossus 2 has 550k GB200s & GB300s. So my guess on costs would be like ~$10B for Colossus 1, and Colossus 2 would be like ~20b.
- denimnerd42 5mo agoa GB300 rack is like 5-6 million so seems a bit low.
- impulser_ 5mo agoYeah, maybe these aren't good guesses. I was basing it off CapEx and Elon's tweet about them. Maybe C2 isn't completely filled yet.
- treis 5mo agoIt has $25 billion on AI cap expenditure in the S1. So generally looks like a solid deal for SpaceX.
- electriclove 5mo agoMaybe 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.
- sroussey 5mo agoTesla loses out on that revenue since it was their chips to begin with, right?
- ykl 5mo agoAt the time of the announcement IIRC the deal was only for Colossus 1. Is Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 new? At the time the consensus narrative was that SpaceX no longer needed Colossus 1 for Grok and that was why it could be leased to Anthropic while Colossus 2 would handle Grok training and inference. Does Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 change this?
- impulser_ 5mo agoThey are. This is from their "Chief Compute Officer". https://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375 https://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375
- jprd 5mo agoRight. This compute still being powered by an illegal amount of gas turbines in a residential neighborhood? Claude is eating so much compute, the threat of that power being tuned down by lawsuit (rightfully) is worth the risk to Anthropic in the short-term. Instead of declaring "bubble", I'm just going to say that's so crazy.
- gpm 5mo agoOr SpaceX is absorbing the risk should that power be turned off... still morally shitty but not obviously economically so.
- ACCount37 5mo agoColossus 1 is in an industrial area, next door to a grid scale natural gas power plant. One that's fully operational.
- dbalatero 5mo agoThen why do they keep getting sued, then going one state over and running the same playbook that got them sued in the previous state? https://naacp.org/articles/naacp-sues-xai-illegal-pollution-data-center-power-plant https://naacp.org/articles/naacp-sues-xai-illegal-pollution-...
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- keeda 5mo agoWhoa. I've said before, but I think Dario severely underestimated the coming demand and ensuing need for compute, and would need to pay through the nose when the crunch hit. I suspect that Google deal also worked out better for Google. This data point supports that view. While Altman got laughed out of the room as a "podcasting bro" asking for trillions in investment in compute, Dario was going on about how difficult it is to forecast capacity on the Dwarkesh podcast. Seems like a major unforced error on Dario's part. What I cannot understand is how they both came to such different perspectives; my best guess is that ChatGPT has so much more traffic that OpenAI could gauge the trends much better. This won't hurt Anthropic long-term of course, but this won't look great on that balance sheet, that too right around the time they plan to IPO.
- sdwr 5mo agoThey have different personalities. I can only imagine Altman wants to stay on top of the chaos, and believes he will come out ahead whatever happens, while Dario is trying to stay realistic and mitigate worst-case scenarios.
- stingraycharles 5mo agoBeing drowned in demand and scrambling for compute because you’re more successful than anticipated is a better problem than the other way around.
- keeda 5mo agoOh, for sure it could be much worse -- they could have been in xAI's place! ;-) But while this is a "good problem to have" it would have been an even better problem to avoid in the first place, because it seemed avoidable. Now, I'm totally armchair billionaire-CEO-ing here, but anybody with any compute has been so obviously capacity constrained for so many quarters all the while scrambling like mad and spending obscene amounts of money to acquire even more compute. With lead times of 2 - 3 years, something Dario explicitly called out on Dwarkesh, it seemed prudent to acquire first, ask questions later. Worst case, they could have rented any extra capacity out, like Elon is doing! Outsiders are reasonably questioning this mania but Dario, as one of the biggest believers in AI and even AGI, showing hesitancy seems uncharacteristic. I wonder if this is one of those rare cases where it would have been better to drink his own Kool Aid! Anthropic got somewhat lucky that Elon wanted to stick it to Altman, but boy, even then he drove a hard bargain.
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- chvid 5mo agoAs far as I can Google the colossus data centers did cost about 7-10 and 18 B respectively. Renting them out in part at 1.25 B pr month sounds like a very good deal for spacex.
- BoredPositron 5mo agoIt's really not.
- gekoxyz 5mo agocan you elaborate?
- lumost 5mo agoNapkin 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?
- bluecalm 5mo agoThat assumes they are renting out the whole capacity. Have you seen anything suggesting that's the case?
- tredre3 5mo agoAnthropic 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-capacity-at-spacexs-colossus-data-center-180327774.html?guccounter=1 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-to-rent-all-ai-capa... I don't know about Cursor.
- kennethrc 5mo ago> COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177 It may be sick, but someone's got a sense of humor over there :)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- gclawes 5mo agoTHERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
- sneak 5mo agoREESTABLISH THE LINK OR ACTION WILL BE TAKEN wickedly underrated film. my all time favorite in the skynet genre. the vocoder speech at the end is just exquisite.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- infinitewars 5mo agoSpaceX has a Golden Dome contract, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s... That's basically exactly this ^
- DarmokJalad1701 5mo ago> "Thinking this will prevent war, the US government gives an impenetrable supercomputer total control over launching nuclear missiles" That's not even close to what the Golden Dome is. > The Golden Dome is a planned multi-layer missile defense system for the United States, intended to detect and destroy ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles before they launch or during their flight. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
- etempleton 5mo agoThe whole AI world really is completely circular spending where every one loses money along the way. The only one really making any money is Nvidia.
- kurthr 5mo agoExcept that they're loaning a bunch of money to their "customers" to "buy" their products. It's still really circular.
- etempleton 5mo agoThis thing is going to explode. From this I have to imagine OpenAIs numbers are also going to be much worse than people imagine / what has been shared.
- btian 5mo agoHow is SpaceX not making money? Total investment is 20-40B, rent to Anthropic for 45B over 3 years. Anthropic is also profitable now.
- etempleton 5mo agoAnthropic is not profitable and does not expect to be revenue even until 2028. They are just losing less billions per year than everyone else.
- theptip 5mo agoAs always, free cash flow and unit economics are more interesting than net profit. By which metrics Anthropic is making a lot of money.
- fooblaster 5mo agohow exactly can you assume they have unit profitability
- cherioo 5mo agoIt’s also interesting that Cursor (that spacex is acquiring ) also just announced yesterday they are training in colossus. So who’s using it? Is spacex just renting out parts of their data center? Or is cursor done done?
- mvkel 5mo agoIf this doesn't completely destroy any benefit of doubt that people have in Dario, I don't know what to say. The guy has been speaking out of both sides of his mouth since the foundation of Anth. Over and over he repeated that Anth's investment in compute would not be reckless; it would represent sanity and be proportional to growth. Over and over Anth told users that the models weren't nerfed overnight, we were just prompting wrong. As expected, Anth simply failed to make the early compute deals when everyone else did, and are now forced to be on the wrong end of price gouging just to keep pace. Actions speak louder than words.
- lz400 5mo agoEven if we consider what they pay for colossus high (I've no idea, I haven't looked at the numbers), wouldn't this a bit be different from "investing in infrastructure"? They're not building the DC themselves, they're just renting, they can scale down to 0 anytime and not have pressure to recover costs, they don't have debt on the HW, etc.
- JCTheDenthog 5mo agoAt least from how it's described in the filing, it sounds like they're committed through 2029 on the deal with SpaceX. So they can't just pull out without a massive lawsuit from SpaceX.
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo agoActually, what the filing says is: "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. The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice."
- nl 5mo agoI don't see how this follows at all? It's true that Anthropic didn't buy as much compute as OpenAI. But OpenAI's compute purchases are one of the largest investments in human history. It's also true that they are now scrambling for compute, and might be paying more than OpenAI paid. But now they have the revenue to justify it! To me it is the opposite of "speaking out of both sides of his mouth" - he's been consistent in his "we won't be reckless in buying compute too far ahead of demand" message.
- kgc 5mo agoIf my napkin math is right, Anthropic will make SpaceX/Xai whole on the initial investment for Colossus 2 + operating costs + a small profit by the end of the contract. No massive profits, although they may be able to fudge accounting to make it seem that way.
- world2vec 5mo agoYou're ignoring all the depreciation costs.