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Keep in mind Google also rents GPUs via GCP, so they could be just reselling these to GCP customers?

Thing is though, Anthropic was really against the wall with lack of compute pre xAI deal. And tbh, Gemini reliability has been abysmal which probably points to real compute shortages.

And nearly _every_ major DC project is really up against it with massive delays, etc. Stargate UAE has been badly affected by the Iran conflict.

So maybe long term this isn't a great business, but _right now_ I'm not convinced it's all financial engineering. There is a enormous shortage of compute and xAI has a load of it _available now_.

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> So maybe long term this isn't a great business, but _right now_

Exactly! "Maybe not a long term great business" is exactly the opposite of what you want to buy in an IPO.

This is a "private equity can squeeze out a ton of cash from this asset portfolio" situation, and very much not a "in a few years this will be a trillion dollar business competing with the biggest companies in the world" bet.

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Could you please describe the other satellite launch services whose prices are competitive with SpaceX?
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The whole of the space part of SpaceX is like 10% of the claimed business according to their S-1. And most of that is Starlink, not launches for third parties.
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SpaceX's launch business is great, but does not justify the majority of the valuation.
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We will see China comming up soon i would argue.

But otherwise yeah SpaceX one that one for now. Only issue with this: We don't have enough payload for SpaceX to expand that much more.

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If you are asking for government and research needs rather than commercial then ISRO (Indian space research organization) beats SpaceX

That being said, ISRO focuses more on research and scientific world as compared to the commercial world but they were the least expensive option out there before SpaceX and the only differential which causes the pricing is actually re-usability aspect of SpaceX rockets/launchers and ISRO is actively working towards that too.

And another thing as brainwad said here but Space part of SpaceX is just 10% of the claimed business according to their S-1

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> Which is to say: Grok basically failed as a frontier AI and they need to pivot to a business model which makes money.

They can just run Grok as a local AI inside Tesla cars. It's actually really efficient as a compute platform because the Tesla cars are in motion at highway speeds, which gives you lots of free airflow for shedding waste heat via the car radiator. Way more efficient than trying to run AI on space satellites.

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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.
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Grok has plenty of "non-woke AI" cred which will make it a preferred choice for lots of government-side and politically sensitive workloads.
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I am pretty sure the gov gets an uncensored /heretic version of the AI models instead of the nanny stuff we get so Grok really doesn’t have a “killer” feature. Even for multi model passes(I.e used purely as a contrarian gate) it’s not really that great due the high rate of hallucinations.
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Anecdotally, Grok is mostly not that anti-woke. It is coasting off of its reputation from Elon's marketing. That said, it does have meaningfully fewer guardrails, which is a real benefit.
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Nazi AI is bad actually, most governments will not want to be associated with it
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What do you think the term woke actually means?
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I think their point is less that it really means something and more that enough customers think it means something to provide economic opportunity
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The only frontier lab to be selling the compute rather than inference seems to say more about this economic opportunity.
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Something which is inconvenient to trumptys
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lol, not sure if this is a joke, but Teslas do not have anything close to the necessary hardware to run grok locally.
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Who’s going to be paying for the energy? People have been floating using the cars as compute for years and it just doesn’t make any financial sense for anyone.
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Teslas spend a tiny percentage of their life at highway speeds, and a major selling point of the platform is that their compute would be used to pilot the vehicle.

If they could train using Teslas they wouldn't have needed Dojo.

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Xai seems pointless, and they've got gpus needing to be used for something.
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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.
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There is no evidence they can deliver anything competitive based on their past performance, though.

Even if their model is competitive or even surpasses e.g. Deepseek (which is far from given) how would that justify a huge valuation?

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Strongly agree with all of this, except that charging rent for the use of an asset you own is not what economic "rent-seeking" means. I blame the dumbass economists who named it this, forever polluting the discussion to be had about regulatory capture and legalized political bribery.
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