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by TheAlchemist 33 days ago
What 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.
4 comments

The AI row of the capex table in the S-1 should be a pretty close approximation.
Nobody pays MSRP at that scale
Given global demand and that they were late to the order party, they probably paid more lol
Yes and no. They paid what everyone else pays for those gpus. NVIDIA make the profit and leaves crumbs for the rest. For other components they paid less, but since the gpus are the majority of the cost…
Closer to 18b than 40. Running costs are 1-2b a year.
More like $25 billion since 2025, with $7 billion of spending in the past 3 months. Look at page 22 of the filing.
Anthropic 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

The S-1 states that it gets capacity from both Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.
... and a sign Anthropic couldn't find enough compute anywhere else, so they had to bite the bullet. Interesting.