Google Will Pay SpaceX $920 Million Per Month For Compute
- Reference: 0183612588
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/06/05/2017239/google-will-pay-spacex-920-million-per-month-for-compute
- Source link:
> The deal is similar in length and scope to the one SpaceX [4]announced with Anthropic in late May. 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.
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> Google's deal appears to be paying for roughly half the amount of compute that Anthropic has access to at Colossus 1. SpaceX didn't say which specific data center Google would be using. CEO Elon Musk has previously suggested his company would reserve the Colossus 2 data center for xAI. Anthropic was significantly limited in its compute capacity prior to its deal with SpaceX, raising usage limits on the same day the deal was announced. Google is in a very different position, with some estimates naming it as the world's largest single owner of AI compute.
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> [...] Also like the Anthropic deal, the agreement with Google includes a cancellation clause. Both SpaceX and Google have the option to terminate the agreement with 90 days notice after December 31, 2026. Google's access to the data center will ramp up "through September at a reduced fee," according to the filing. "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 reduction in the monthly fees, it reads.
[1] https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/05/21/0343258/spacex-reveals-its-finances-for-the-first-time
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026041150/spacexagreementfwp.htm
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/05/google-will-pay-spacex-920m-per-month-for-compute/
[4] https://slashdot.org/story/26/05/07/0424216/anthropic-raises-claude-code-usage-limits-credits-new-deal-with-spacex
Well.. Okay then... (Score:3)
Not sure that giving money to a third party to make your core product experience worse is the best of ideas. Google has the cash to see how it turns out, no question about it.
I am also very skeptical that there is any path to make the costs for LLM-based search the same as traditional search. I don't think Google can charge much more for advertising services either.
Of course, my bias is that people want predictable results when interacting with a search engine. Maybe I am wrong about that.
Re: (Score:2)
Google is not comparing the costs or usability of chatbots versus traditional search. They are comparing someone else getting chatbots to replace a significant amount of their search traffic compared to Google doing the same and cannibalizing their own traditional search. It's not a gross margin question for Google but an existential question.
Too lazy to read IPO ... (Score:2)
I'm too lazy to read the IPO, by the time I'd be potentially willing to consider SpaceX the IPO docs will be long obsolete.
So Tesla is not a car company, it is an AI company, and Tesla is part of SpaceX, hence the compute contract?
Re: Too lazy to read IPO ... (Score:2)
Tesla is not part of SpaceX, xAI is now part of SpaceX.
It's all explained in that prospectus.
Viktor the new mongodb footer ad? (Score:2)
I’m getting a harassing advertisement at the bottom of every slash that page for Victor. I’m pro ads to support this site , but this is annoying and harassing.
how does one create an AdGuard rule that will actually work across/thought to kill this ad?
Re: (Score:2)
Lucky you!
I'm told that frisky cougars in neighborhood are wanting me to visit them.
I don't want to leave my basement.
Re: (Score:2)
Full uBlock Origin on Firefox seems to take care of it. Firefox is now the only browser capable of running uBlock Origin.
Re: (Score:2)
You just need to wait for updates. I got the ads for a couple of days, but now the uBlock Origin blocklists have been updated again to block them.
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Do not mess with Viktor. He will drag you into the bathtub and pour acid on you, while shooting people.
+$8000 per GPU per month. (Score:3)
That should be enough to cover the electricity bill and get a100% ROI within 6 months.
Re: (Score:2)
In other news, Google is selling $80 billion in new stock to fund AI infrastructure. So, as I said in a post above, I suspect Google is only a temporary customer of SpaceX/xAI.
The fact that Google/Alphabet would risk stock dilution rather than just sell some bonds tells me that it sees a serious upside to the AI game, and needs flexible no-strings cash (i.e., without repayment schedules) to drive it forward. And the fact that it's renting GPU cycles from SpaceX means that it needs this compute-structure rig
Re: (Score:2)
You ever run a GPU at full bore like that? This isn't like the mining gpus which were intentionally underclocked these are going to be running at full steam.
What I'm saying is they're not going to last. Depreciation is a major problem for these AI data centers.
But that assumes any money ever changes hands. Over and over and over again Elon makes deals that have a long list of requirements he can't meet and gets headlines by pretending he can meet all those requirements and that he will get paid the e
I hope Dr. Forbin has stock options (Score:3)
Too soon to welcome our new [1]Colossus [wikipedia.org] overlord?
[Spoiler: It doesn't end well for humanity.]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
Good for Musk; bad for Google (Score:2)
stupid waste of money
What I'm reading (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like Musk bought a shitload of GPUs that he doesn't need, because nobody is using Grok besides idiots on Twitter to make "sick memes."
If they have all those GPUs energized and can afford to lease them to their competition, that just tells us nobody is using them.
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I'm guessing Musk had SpaceX acquire xAI and then the people that actually know about business at SpaceX said "This Grok product is a big money pit, but there's a shortage of hardware that Google and Anthropic will pay loads to use"
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> [...] the people that actually know about business at SpaceX said "This Grok product is a big money pit, but there's a shortage of hardware that Google and Anthropic will pay loads to use"
Only temporarily, I suspect. Google and Anthropic are perfectly able to build their own compute-centers, and I suspect would rather do that than feed their competition. Once the hardware is available, of course.
Companies do help their competitors out from time to time when production-loads become unbalanced. (Pepsi has canned Coke and vice-versa, for example.) But, as I said, only temporarily.
Re: (Score:2)
> (Pepsi has canned Coke and vice-versa, for example.)
Hold on, I might be wrong about that. I remember hearing a news story about that several decades ago, but can't confirm it now.
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Google and Anthropic are perfectly able to build their own compute-centers, but it may not be economically a good idea at this point. Remember, the AI hype is dying and the investors are starting to smell a rat. Leasing GPUs from Elon means Google and Anthropic are not stuck with tons of hardware they can't monetize in the future. If things go bad, they just stop paying for access and Elon is left holding the bag.
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It also tells us he's making $1B / month, but let's gloss over that part, lol. Haters gonna hate.
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Keep in mind a lot of these deals turn out to be bullshit. They are contingent on a laundry list of requirements that never seem to all line up and put money in muskrat's pocket. The only thing that seems to put money in his pocket is the US government and our 401k and pension programs. That shits made him a trillionaire.
Meanwhile SpaceX's entire business model is based on creating a super duper ultra AI that dominates everyone's AIs.
I am guessing the point you are getting at is that being a cloud p