Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by sorenjan on Friday June 05, 2026 @04:31PM
(#48417802)
Is this another circular investment to help pump up the stock valuation? Why would Google need to rent that much compute?
> Google parent Alphabet has made a windfall from backing SpaceX, which was worth $12 billion at the time of its 2015 investment, and is looking to go public at a valuation of over $1.75 trillion
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by sandeepkd on Friday June 05, 2026 @04:35PM
(#48417867)
> SpaceX said in the filing that if it fails to “deliver access to the committed amount of GPUs by September 30, 2026,” Google can immediately end the agreement, or accept the number of GPUs provided at a reduced fee after a one-month grace period.
> After this year, the agreement can be terminated by either party provided they give 90 days’ notice.
Circular financing at its peak for the IPO. There has to be some regulatory body to not allow such shady things
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by JumpCrisscross on Friday June 05, 2026 @04:39PM
(#48417924)
> Circular financing
Circular financing would require SpaceX to buy a similar quantity of stuff from Google. (Or invest in Google.) We have no evidence of that. Instead this looks like Google taking advantage of SpaceX’s desire to print revenue today versus a month from now.
(If the agreement is terminated with no exchange of goods, it might be market manipulation. But still not circular financing.)
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by singron on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:02PM
(#48418240)
It's circular since Google owns part of SpaceX. According to [1] they own 7% of SpaceX, so a $1.75T IPO would value their stake at $120B. The target IPO price is >90x revenue, so if Google increases SpaceX's revenue by $11B, SpaceX's valuation could increase by $990B to maintain the same multiple, which would increase the value of Google's stake by $69B.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by JumpCrisscross on Friday June 05, 2026 @07:59PM
(#48419929)
> It's circular since Google owns part of SpaceX
Not what circular financing means. Buying from a company you own stock in can be a conflict of interest, but it's only circular if you invest in the company and then they use those proceeds to buy your stuff. A past investor buying services from a company they are affiliated with is pretty par for the course in business.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by singron on Friday June 05, 2026 @06:11PM
(#48419006)
I'm not sure this is true for Google. Ignoring their equity in Anthropic, AI is generally a threat to Google, since it's the closest thing to upsetting their search monopoly. The best case for Google is if OpenAI and Anthropic are way out over their skis, and Google is the only major player left with their sturdier financial position. The worst case is if ChatGPT/Claude completely displace search and nobody wants to pay for gemini. I find it unlikely that all three go down for the same reason.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by JumpCrisscross on Friday June 05, 2026 @08:04PM
(#48419969)
More to the point, allegations of circular financing are about following cash. When NVIDIA invests in a company so they can buy NVIDIA chips, that raises a unique set of questions distinct from other types of conflict of interest. Affiliated parties doing business, as is the case between Google and SpaceX, has its own host of conflict-of-interest concerns. But they're distinct from those that arise in circular transactions.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by harmmonica on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:10PM
(#48418347)
Yeah, I just looked this up because my first thought was another circular financing deal (or not circular by definition but certainly backscratching). Looks like Google's SpaceX stake, diluted, based on a cursory search, at a $1.5T valuation is somewhere in the $80-$100B neighborhood (bought back in 2015 I think is what it said when SpaceX was valued in the low tens of billions if I'm remembering correctly). So you have Google sending $12B back to SpaceX annually in this deal, so maybe 12% or so of their equity stake at that valuation. I'm not sure how to feel about it other than a means of swaying people to buy into the IPO with the added benefit of actual compute value.
And seems silly to ignore that the Google founders and Elon are buddies, or were, based on which gossip rag you believe in, and there's zero chance these types of deals are being made independent of those guys talking (when are they ever, of course, but it's even more obvious in this case given the players and their histories).
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by sandeepkd on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:06PM
(#48418289)
I avoided adding too many details, made a base assumption that folks on this topic would already be aware of google's investment in spaceX, probably should have added that too
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by jeffbee on Friday June 05, 2026 @04:36PM
(#48417881)
I thought it was notable that in Google's press release yesterday regarding their new facilities near Amarillo they seemed to go out of their way to point out that the applications are not AI, listing "Search, Gmail, Maps, Cloud, online banking, and 911 systems" instead. I wonder if they find it more convenient to rent an existing one rather than face public scrutiny for building another "AI data center".
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by jeffbee on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:09PM
(#48418335)
Perhaps. It also seems to insulate Google from the risk that air quality regulators will be unexpectedly reinvigorated, while still providing to Google the benefits of xAI's lawlessness.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by JumpCrisscross on Friday June 05, 2026 @04:49PM
(#48418083)
> How did Elon get so much NVIDIA hardware before everyone else?
He’s the richest man on the planet and doesn’t have a track record of not paying for shit he buys. If you want to reliably offload your chips, he’s safer than e.g. OpenAI who might or might not have the money when the bill comes due.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by ckastner on Friday June 05, 2026 @04:58PM
(#48418189)
> He’s the richest man on the planet and doesn’t have a track record of not paying for shit he buys.
My impression was the other way around. The shenanigans he pulled around the Twitter acquisition were just farcical, and at Twitter he repeatedly refused to pay owed rent, etc. (I assume as a ploy to renegotiate terms).
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by guax on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:32PM
(#48418625)
I don't care either way but I got curious.
Not an easy thing to gauge. X/Twitter stopped publishing MAUs after the acquisition.
External estimates vary, some point to growth, some to stagnation. We know that revenue suffered. LOTS of partisan and emotional opinions for either.
Google trends does paint a bleak picture for X but I am also questioning how much google itself can gauge that after LLMs exploded in popularity.
Anecdotally I did notice that references and embeds to X are way less prominent and common than before. My usual news used to be filled with them. My consumption of the platform also plummeted after not being able to read threads when not logged, its much harder for me to get drawn into it.
Still without data, I would be surprised if the changes to verification and logged out access did not massively hurt new adoption. With tiktoks prevalence amongst a new generation I would bet its a matter of time before X gets grouped to tumbler/facebook, not dead, but way past its peak and cultural relevance. If that has not already happened.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by lanstin on Saturday June 06, 2026 @11:44AM
(#48426101)
Anecdata: Mastodon now has witty, un-earnest comments semi-regularly. And I have learned of maybe ten percent of breaking news things in the last three months on Mastodon via links that weren’t just to twitter.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by etempleton on Friday June 05, 2026 @10:12PM
(#48420730)
Impact in the zeitgeist. Twitter was everywhere. Regularly referenced on live news television statins. Was considered a major news source. Shows had segments dedicated to it. Everyone and every brand had a Twitter. That is not the case today. Not by a long shot.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by Analemma_ on Friday June 05, 2026 @04:48PM
(#48418051)
On the one hand, yes, this is really embarrassing for Grok. On the other hand, everyone except a couple Twitter randos already thinks Grok is worthless junk: there's no reputation left for it to to lose. And Elon is crying all the way to the bank with an extra $11bn in annual revenue.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by wnmurphy on Friday June 05, 2026 @04:49PM
(#48418073)
Which means more Grok degradation, more severe throttling, etc.
I can't understand why xAI charges 50% more per month for Grok over competitors when it doesn't even gracefully downgrade to a cheaper model when paid subscribers hit the limit.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by JumpCrisscross on Friday June 05, 2026 @08:00PM
(#48419944)
> can't understand why xAI charges 50% more per month for Grok over competitors
One potential read is xAI knows Grok isn't going to be a Tier 1 model. So while SpaceX focusses on infrastructure, Grok bets its users like its model enough that they'll pay a premium for it, even if this curtails growth prospects.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by glimshe on Friday June 05, 2026 @06:07PM
(#48418980)
Grok is pretty good. It really excels when the results can be improved by deep online search. It tends to be more aggressive in looking things up than competitors. I use it in certain situations.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by gitaarik on Sunday June 07, 2026 @02:11AM
(#48432318)
That's maybe a bit of an unfair, out-of-balance comment. Google Gemini had it's own fails on the other side of the extreme. Both have corrected themselves. Don't keep coming up with old stuff.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by cherry_tree on Sunday June 07, 2026 @05:30AM
(#48433250)
You are being very dishonest here. Gemini did not praise hitler, excuse South African apartheid, or create its own version of Wikipedia with blatant nazi, white supremacy and anti-Islamic content. Googles CEO did not subsequently claim these things were the truth.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by gitaarik on Sunday June 07, 2026 @01:48PM
(#48437087)
I'm not saying that, it's the opposite: Gemini generated too-woke images, like all images of people was like at least 50% colored, no matter what, even if you asked it to generate images of German World War 2 soldiers, it mostly generated black people in nazi uniforms.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by cherry_tree on Sunday June 07, 2026 @11:01PM
(#48440874)
Your replies are non-sequitors to the discussion in this thread.
Statement “I use grok to consume current events”
Response “grok is not a reliable source for information, especially current events or politics”
Your response “but Gemini generated images that right wingers didn’t like”
Ok? Are those images the news? Is that a way to consume current events? Do you think I’m a proponent of people using LLMs to digest current events and am only against grok specifically? What exactly is your argument against mine (that grok shouldn’t be used to consume current events). Are you agreeing? Or are you suggesting that people should use grok for current events because Gemini produced images you didn’t like?
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by gitaarik on Monday June 08, 2026 @02:42AM
(#48441997)
You gave the argument that Grok isn't trustable because of their nazi fails.
My argument was that you're maybe a bit biased, because similar issues have happened with other prominent companies.
Both companies corrected themselves on the issues.
I don't think your argument has much ground right now. Grok might be leaning into a certain direction, but you can say that about any AI or news station.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by gitaarik on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @03:28AM
(#48472759)
You're misreading. Nazism isn't being treated as acceptable, neither is wokeism. Both companies have apologized for these incidents, and have addressed the problems.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by gitaarik on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @02:21PM
(#48480506)
I haven't equated them, I've used them as examples of opposite extremes.
I think Nazism is extreme right, and wokeism is extreme left. It's both out of balance. And Google and xAI both acknowledged that, and addressed the problems.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by gitaarik on Thursday June 11, 2026 @03:56AM
(#48487578)
Nazi is the terminology you chose for referring to past Grok issues. Woke is the terminology I used to refer to past Gemini issues.
Regardless of the terminology, I think we should look at the issues themselves, and not mindlessly apply a certain ideaology upon a company for certain past issues.
In short: maybe xAI aren't the nazi's you seem to think they are, and maybe this woke movement that you seem to adore isn't as innocent as they make themselves out to be.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by cherry_tree on Tuesday June 09, 2026 @01:30PM
(#48464347)
@dang can you explain how the comment below me got marked dead? How many flags did it receive? By whom? This is genuinely very concerning, this comment is not off topic or in anyway deserving to be flagged. Do you or the other moderator disagree with that statement?
Here is the text of the comment in question:
“As someone stumbling across this thread: the idea that, in regards to bias, a real person might actually consider these two events in any way comparable is honestly leaving me stunned. I can't find the right words to describe how sickening it is to see Nazism being treated as just as banally acceptable as any other political direction.”
All such classifiers are imperfect, of course, but we have no choice but to use them because HN is being inundated with content that has been either generated or edited by LLMs, and the community feels strongly about this.
I've unkilled the comment now, although its information/indignation ratio is low enough that I would not call it a good comment for HN, and no, that doesn't mean I disagree with it.
We're trying for something different here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by cherry_tree on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @04:03AM
(#48473031)
I wasn’t asking if you agreed with the comment in question but in my statement that there is no obvious reason in the content that it should be flagged; it seems you did agree since you restored the comment. Thanks for your feedback and attention.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by guywithahat on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:10PM
(#48418345)
I've used/use it. For a while it had one of the best lightweight coding LLM's, which actually lead to a #1 spot on openrouter usage ranking although they've fallen off the top 10 used now. It's also provided some good reasoning models, which perform better when dealing with non-PC topics.
Also, although I've never used it for this, I believe some of the paid models produce some of the best "adult" content, and I know there are even subreddits which do nothing but praise Grok and "content" produces who use it.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by guywithahat on Friday June 05, 2026 @06:13PM
(#48419028)
Without giving too many details I thought it would be fun to make 2D games based off of banned books (sort of as a marketing ploy, paradoxically everybody likes banned books). Camp of the saints seemed like a good target, which is a fictional book based in 1980's France dealing with incoming flotillas of immigration. I found that ChatGPT would push back on the premise of the novel instead of coding, while grok models just called things "edgy" and went to work.
I have more examples (mostly dealing with realtime web filtering) but that's the immediate one that comes to mind.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by paulpauper on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:12PM
(#48418376)
They already make it required to have a premium X account
Claude has tons of throttling already. Chat GPT is not as accurate at computational problems despite less throttling. Gemini has fewest restrictions but worse quality. Always a tradeoff.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by mschuster91 on Friday June 05, 2026 @04:56PM
(#48418169)
Probably because it has all but zero filters on the input and output. It took widespread media outrage about "grok show me her in a bikini" to at least create a filter that bans such things.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by harmmonica on Friday June 05, 2026 @04:54PM
(#48418143)
Tangent alert: a couple of questions for folks who know far more than I do about compute capacity and Google these days...
Lately, like the past few months, I've noticed Google services (search, gmail, drive, maps) running very slowly to the point where, at the moment it happens, I always think it has to be my connection and not Google, but sure enough every time I check a couple of speed tests and they're... fine. And then I don't seem to be having the same latency from other sites/apps. Is there any chance that the commingling of the AI snippet and then directing users into the AI funnel through the text box is actually causing material performance impacts in other Google properties? Probably a dumb question because I can't imagine they would allow performance for broader properties to suffer for AI prompts/chats, but then again all this talk of compute starts making me think otherwise, like the prolific amount of prompting and chatting is causing massive across-the-board performance issues.
Somewhat related, but does anyone use Gemini and end up with the experience where you have a chat and it's obvious, to yourself and to Gemini, that you're trying to find a product to purchase, but Gemini doesn't even link you to what you would think would be the obvious place to purchase the product? This happens daily where I interact with it, it suggests some products, but won't even provide a link to that product or, if it does provide a link, it's to some no name site that wouldn't come up as a highly-ranked paid or organic result through regular Google search. Keeps making me think this is a Google performance problem where they have not figured out how to take the entire AI chat and engineer it back into a simple short keyword phrase to get an acceptable search result.
Btw, if anyone's thinking "why are you using Gemini because it's the worst?" I think that's fair and right. I have... reasons, but they're not super sensible ones.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by spprashant on Friday June 05, 2026 @08:06PM
(#48419977)
Couple of anecdotes from the last week.
Yesterday the Gmail virus scanner stopped working. For a while I couldn't download my attachments. A few minutes later it said the virus scanner was offline and download at your own risk.
Meet audio seems to be having a particularly bad week. It just doesn't work with headphones. Their testing tool indicated everything was fine. It's worked after I logged off and on. Audio quality issues are getting more common as well.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by opwieurposiu on Friday June 05, 2026 @06:31PM
(#48419191)
Yes. When I plug my phone into the car it used to use google assistant to process voice commands and it was pretty fast. Now for some reason it has switched to Gemini and it takes twice as long to play a song or send a text. Sometimes Gemini forgets it even has the ability to play songs. Gemini is better at answering random questions that the kids ask though.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by bluecalm on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:07PM
(#48418293)
Maybe agentic PRs made it to production and performance cratered.
On a serious note I feel the same. Google is slow these days and the slowest and least reliable service of them all is Gemini. Sometimes I don't even know if it hang already (no error messages) or if it's still "thinking".
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by harmmonica on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:15PM
(#48418428)
I'm probably 50/50 with search in particular logged in vs. out and I do think I notice on both, but I'm not entirely sure. Just saying the search and maps algorithm is wading through so much of my history that it can't help but choke trying to deliver the "right" results?
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by jeffbee on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:24PM
(#48418541)
No, but I was thinking it might be possible that your account is specifically afflicted by some storage problem. For example, it could be homed in the wrong part of the world, compared to where your browser is hitting frontend applications. Or a million other possibilities. When logged out those wouldn't be factors.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by dmode on Friday June 05, 2026 @06:40PM
(#48419271)
It's not an AI company. It is a datacenter company. While all frontier AI labs are fighting for compute SpaceX is give up compute, instead of reserving it for their own models. That tells you all we need to know
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by verdverm on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:13PM
(#48418395)
Google is getting in bed with some folks even more unsavory than themselves. The thing I noted most from I/O was how prominent and proud the are of partnering with Palantir. "Do no evil" has become "Let's do evil"
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by shostack on Friday June 05, 2026 @09:13PM
(#48420399)
More like incredibly lucky that the global hardware market dried up for compute capacity even as his AI product flopped. Right place at the right time.
I just dislike that it is now harder to avoid giving Musk money directly or indirectly.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by otterley on Sunday June 07, 2026 @12:00AM
(#48431649)
It’s not “black magic” to sell excess GPU capacity to third parties to make a profit. This is a legitimate business venture. It’s just not the business that people naturally expect a business with a name of Space Exploration Technologies to be making the most revenue from.
They’re in good company, competing with Amazon, CoreWeave, Google, Microsoft, Nebius, and many other players for the same business. They just invested (through the X.ai acquisition) in more capacity than they could take advantage of to get there.
Even if they manage to make a profit selling this capacity to Google, Anthropic, and others, it might not be enough to push them into profitability as a whole. That remains to be seen, and you keep asserting without evidence that it is true.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by spunker540 on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:56PM
(#48418890)
I think in the case of supply-constrained GPUs, you can get the opposite of a volume discount. Google has the most capacity of anyone, the fact they’re paying so much per month to spacex is pretty remarkable
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by bwfan123 on Saturday June 06, 2026 @12:17PM
(#48426411)
You could also read it the other way. That there is a lot of stranded gpu-capacity which is not being allocated correctly. And buyers would rather rent - than build out themselves.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by yalogin on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:35PM
(#48418652)
So space data centers are absolutely possible then. I heard a lot of skepticism about the feasibility but it looks like Google and Anthropic looked at SpaceX and trusted them to deliver on the promise and even signed deals worth billions.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by etc-hosts on Saturday June 06, 2026 @11:07AM
(#48425783)
They have unused capacity in their Tennessee datacenter. We don't know everything but the backend of Grok probably runs in the TN datacenter. Grok is not as popular as hoped, so the TN datacenter has unused capacity.
There are other companies besides Google and Anthropic that are considering renting capacity in xaispacex's datacenters.
Global capacity for GPU hosting is tight at the moment. That TN DC is the only one not totally 110 percent already allocated for five years in the world .
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by arjunchint on Saturday June 06, 2026 @04:29PM
(#48428695)
I am really wondering if Google is just subleasing Anthropic capacity. The terms are suspiciously the same as Anthropic's and Anthropic was supposed to have leased out all of Colossus 1.
Maybe with the corp token spending limits and the rise of codex, Anthropic saw steep deceleration in usuage?
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by chiph on Saturday June 06, 2026 @06:40PM
(#48429753)
Google has code written for their Tensor processors (TPU). Will it run on the NVidia GPUs that xAI has? Because I'm thinking they're "not part of their core architecture" and it will thus be money wasted.
(I thought for sure the title was backwards - it's a strange world)
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by latentframe on Sunday June 07, 2026 @12:16AM
(#48431738)
All important technologic revolution can turn into an infrastructure revolution => the railroads, electricity etc … so the technology can be a transformation while the capital cycle becomes in excess
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by mikewarot on Sunday June 07, 2026 @06:37AM
(#48433522)
The agreement in question is quite short[1], and includes no penalties for failure to provide the required compute amount other than pro-rating things. There's nothing in this that you couldn't sign even if you had no GPUs to offer Google.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that this is like Google agreeing to buy a billion dollars of lemonade from Tim's lemonade stand, Inc, and Tim is 8 years old.
I don't see how this provides any cover to xAI/SpaceX as far as SEC rules go for getting into the top 100 stock index.
Re:Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity a...
by burnerRhodov3 on Sunday June 07, 2026 @08:46PM
(#48440179)
at 2.4B a month they get buyback on both C1 and C2 in one year... or, over the useful life of their datacenters (around 7-10 years before swapping to latest tech) they will make around $201B-$288B off these two deals alone.
Elon is the greatest capital allocator of all time.
> Google parent Alphabet has made a windfall from backing SpaceX, which was worth $12 billion at the time of its 2015 investment, and is looking to go public at a valuation of over $1.75 trillion
> After this year, the agreement can be terminated by either party provided they give 90 days’ notice.
Circular financing at its peak for the IPO. There has to be some regulatory body to not allow such shady things
Circular financing would require SpaceX to buy a similar quantity of stuff from Google. (Or invest in Google.) We have no evidence of that. Instead this looks like Google taking advantage of SpaceX’s desire to print revenue today versus a month from now.
(If the agreement is terminated with no exchange of goods, it might be market manipulation. But still not circular financing.)
1: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/alphabet-s...
Not what circular financing means. Buying from a company you own stock in can be a conflict of interest, but it's only circular if you invest in the company and then they use those proceeds to buy your stuff. A past investor buying services from a company they are affiliated with is pretty par for the course in business.
If the SpaceX IPO bombs (or even merely underperforms), the expectations for the Anthropic/OpenAI IPOs collapse, and with that, everything else AI.
AI companies can't afford to let any AI company go down.
How come its not a circular deal where google is investing little bit more money to make a whole lot more money
This is a series of transactions in which money flows from Google to SpaceX. There is no flow of money from SpaceX to Google. So it's not a circle.
Who's taking advantage of who?
Keep in mind, Google has a 6% stake in SpaceX, so this is more like exchanging millions to gain billions.
And seems silly to ignore that the Google founders and Elon are buddies, or were, based on which gossip rag you believe in, and there's zero chance these types of deals are being made independent of those guys talking (when are they ever, of course, but it's even more obvious in this case given the players and their histories).
Still doesn't make it circular financing. If SpaceX issued Google a dividend right after Google paid SpaceX, that would be circular.
He’s the richest man on the planet and doesn’t have a track record of not paying for shit he buys. If you want to reliably offload your chips, he’s safer than e.g. OpenAI who might or might not have the money when the bill comes due.
x not paying bills: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/24/musks-twitter-has-been-sued-...
spacex not paying bills: https://www.fastcompany.com/91124157/spacex-contractors-texa...
My impression was the other way around. The shenanigans he pulled around the Twitter acquisition were just farcical, and at Twitter he repeatedly refused to pay owed rent, etc. (I assume as a ploy to renegotiate terms).
You mean like the time he committed to buying Twitter and then tried to back out of a legally binding contractual agreement to finalize the deal?
Hahaaha. A solid admission of being clueless.
Elon has a strong track record of doing shady stuff to get out of deals.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
> This article was amended on 16 January 2026 because a megawatt is a unit of power, not energy as an earlier version suggested.
He moved as fast as he could with known financing
Amazing to think it was once so ingrained in mainstream society.
Not an easy thing to gauge. X/Twitter stopped publishing MAUs after the acquisition.
External estimates vary, some point to growth, some to stagnation. We know that revenue suffered. LOTS of partisan and emotional opinions for either.
Google trends does paint a bleak picture for X but I am also questioning how much google itself can gauge that after LLMs exploded in popularity.
Anecdotally I did notice that references and embeds to X are way less prominent and common than before. My usual news used to be filled with them. My consumption of the platform also plummeted after not being able to read threads when not logged, its much harder for me to get drawn into it.
Still without data, I would be surprised if the changes to verification and logged out access did not massively hurt new adoption. With tiktoks prevalence amongst a new generation I would bet its a matter of time before X gets grouped to tumbler/facebook, not dead, but way past its peak and cultural relevance. If that has not already happened.
You're in luck. IIRC some of the SpaceX IPO marketing materials said they have 550M MAU.
I can't understand why xAI charges 50% more per month for Grok over competitors when it doesn't even gracefully downgrade to a cheaper model when paid subscribers hit the limit.
One potential read is xAI knows Grok isn't going to be a Tier 1 model. So while SpaceX focusses on infrastructure, Grok bets its users like its model enough that they'll pay a premium for it, even if this curtails growth prospects.
Statement “I use grok to consume current events”
Response “grok is not a reliable source for information, especially current events or politics”
Your response “but Gemini generated images that right wingers didn’t like”
Ok? Are those images the news? Is that a way to consume current events? Do you think I’m a proponent of people using LLMs to digest current events and am only against grok specifically? What exactly is your argument against mine (that grok shouldn’t be used to consume current events). Are you agreeing? Or are you suggesting that people should use grok for current events because Gemini produced images you didn’t like?
My argument was that you're maybe a bit biased, because similar issues have happened with other prominent companies.
Both companies corrected themselves on the issues.
I don't think your argument has much ground right now. Grok might be leaning into a certain direction, but you can say that about any AI or news station.
And commenting to express disagreement but not bothering to say why?
I don't quite understand what's going on here?
I think Nazism is extreme right, and wokeism is extreme left. It's both out of balance. And Google and xAI both acknowledged that, and addressed the problems.
Edit: when woke wants to change historical facts like that nazi soldiers used to be black, yes I think it's just as wrong as to be racist
Regardless of the terminology, I think we should look at the issues themselves, and not mindlessly apply a certain ideaology upon a company for certain past issues.
In short: maybe xAI aren't the nazi's you seem to think they are, and maybe this woke movement that you seem to adore isn't as innocent as they make themselves out to be.
Here is the text of the comment in question:
“As someone stumbling across this thread: the idea that, in regards to bias, a real person might actually consider these two events in any way comparable is honestly leaving me stunned. I can't find the right words to describe how sickening it is to see Nazism being treated as just as banally acceptable as any other political direction.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451979 was classified by our software as genai. That's not allowed on HN - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.
All such classifiers are imperfect, of course, but we have no choice but to use them because HN is being inundated with content that has been either generated or edited by LLMs, and the community feels strongly about this.
I've unkilled the comment now, although its information/indignation ratio is low enough that I would not call it a good comment for HN, and no, that doesn't mean I disagree with it.
While I have you: can you also please stop breaking the site guidelines, such as by posting flamebait, snark, and using HN for ideological battle? You've been doing this repeatedly, (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433250, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420491 in this thread, as well as crossing into personal attack elsewhere).
We're trying for something different here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also, although I've never used it for this, I believe some of the paid models produce some of the best "adult" content, and I know there are even subreddits which do nothing but praise Grok and "content" produces who use it.
that was only because it was free
do you have examples? Do you ask "reason why women belong in the kitchen" or what?
I have more examples (mostly dealing with realtime web filtering) but that's the immediate one that comes to mind.
Claude accuses me of hallucinating events that happened the day before, and it's quite annoying.
Grok 3 and Grok 4 have a 2024 knowledge cutoff. https://docs.x.ai/developers/models
I wish Meta made their own AI/search model because they probably have the best data source.
Claude has tons of throttling already. Chat GPT is not as accurate at computational problems despite less throttling. Gemini has fewest restrictions but worse quality. Always a tradeoff.
[1] https://counterhate.com/research/grok-floods-x-with-sexualiz...
Lately, like the past few months, I've noticed Google services (search, gmail, drive, maps) running very slowly to the point where, at the moment it happens, I always think it has to be my connection and not Google, but sure enough every time I check a couple of speed tests and they're... fine. And then I don't seem to be having the same latency from other sites/apps. Is there any chance that the commingling of the AI snippet and then directing users into the AI funnel through the text box is actually causing material performance impacts in other Google properties? Probably a dumb question because I can't imagine they would allow performance for broader properties to suffer for AI prompts/chats, but then again all this talk of compute starts making me think otherwise, like the prolific amount of prompting and chatting is causing massive across-the-board performance issues.
Somewhat related, but does anyone use Gemini and end up with the experience where you have a chat and it's obvious, to yourself and to Gemini, that you're trying to find a product to purchase, but Gemini doesn't even link you to what you would think would be the obvious place to purchase the product? This happens daily where I interact with it, it suggests some products, but won't even provide a link to that product or, if it does provide a link, it's to some no name site that wouldn't come up as a highly-ranked paid or organic result through regular Google search. Keeps making me think this is a Google performance problem where they have not figured out how to take the entire AI chat and engineer it back into a simple short keyword phrase to get an acceptable search result.
Btw, if anyone's thinking "why are you using Gemini because it's the worst?" I think that's fair and right. I have... reasons, but they're not super sensible ones.
Yesterday the Gmail virus scanner stopped working. For a while I couldn't download my attachments. A few minutes later it said the virus scanner was offline and download at your own risk.
Meet audio seems to be having a particularly bad week. It just doesn't work with headphones. Their testing tool indicated everything was fine. It's worked after I logged off and on. Audio quality issues are getting more common as well.
On a serious note I feel the same. Google is slow these days and the slowest and least reliable service of them all is Gemini. Sometimes I don't even know if it hang already (no error messages) or if it's still "thinking".
also google: renting capacity from a data center powered by 27 methane gas turbines on trailers
https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2026/4/whitehous...
Elon is pulling financial engineering black magic to make this happen.
I just dislike that it is now harder to avoid giving Musk money directly or indirectly.
They’re in good company, competing with Amazon, CoreWeave, Google, Microsoft, Nebius, and many other players for the same business. They just invested (through the X.ai acquisition) in more capacity than they could take advantage of to get there.
Even if they manage to make a profit selling this capacity to Google, Anthropic, and others, it might not be enough to push them into profitability as a whole. That remains to be seen, and you keep asserting without evidence that it is true.
But $12/hr is probably quite accurate. SpaceX' datacenters are horrifyingly expensive, and regular GPUs are being rented below cost in many cases.
Just the gas turbine power alone is horrific. Doubles or triples the power bill and adds a big chunk of depreciation.
There are other companies besides Google and Anthropic that are considering renting capacity in xaispacex's datacenters.
Global capacity for GPU hosting is tight at the moment. That TN DC is the only one not totally 110 percent already allocated for five years in the world .
Or I guess juicing the numbers for IPO
Maybe with the corp token spending limits and the rise of codex, Anthropic saw steep deceleration in usuage?
(I thought for sure the title was backwards - it's a strange world)
everyone understands cuda well enough anyway
This is a ridiculous amount of money.
Have to believe a non-tech company could hire an entire team/company to build datacenters for this kind of money.
Make no mistake - this has to be “do evil” territory.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that this is like Google agreeing to buy a billion dollars of lemonade from Tim's lemonade stand, Inc, and Tim is 8 years old.
I don't see how this provides any cover to xAI/SpaceX as far as SEC rules go for getting into the top 100 stock index.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
https://x.com/BullTheoryio/status/2061029970236133554
Elon is the greatest capital allocator of all time.