this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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...why is SpaceX dealing in retail compute? I'm so confused. Why do they have so much infrastructure? Why are they renting it?
xAI built a datacenter, then built a second even better one. They're renting out the original one because xAI doesn't need both.
edit: or they can't afford to keep both i guess is the other possibility, so they kept the better one and rented the lesser one.
It’s all a scam. The reason why is to make money by gaming the system. The AI bubble has no depth.
Didn't Elon merge xAI into SpaceX?
and he got SpaceX to buy his unsold Cybertrucks.
This is precisely why. xAI spent a huge amount on compute hardware, then got absorbed into SpaceX.
SpaceX doesnt have need for that much compute, and there's certainly not enough Grok demand for it. Meanwhile Anthropic is desperately looking around for anyone to buy compute from.
Apparently they are about to IPO as well. And apparently Xitter is now part of the same company. They should just call it XXX (SpaceX, xAI and Xitter).
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/spacex-ipo-live-updates.html
I heard about that but didn't realize it happened. Or that they took on the name of SpaceX. Super confusing.
In addition to what @tleb@lemmy.ca said: AI data centers are not being built as rapidly as their marketing would lead you to believe. This is basically a last-ditch effort for Anthropic to say they are "bringing more compute online" without anyone building anything new.
I'm beginning to think it's important for them that the compute power not actually come online, because no one with deep knowledge of LLMs really expects the new compute to make the AI any less stupid.
Aa long as the compute is still being built, they can keep making huge vague promises of what is coming soon.
Offhand guess, aerodynamic simulations and stuff take a lot of processing power, which were probably bought much more cheaply pre-AI
They need >$15B worth of compute for aero simulation!?
Ten years ago it was probably 1.5B.
(only partly /s)