So, it's 10B, with $4b of that being attributed to a 5 year depreciation. The rest of the facility probably has a depreciation of around 20 years, and you can easily swap out GPU's, TPU's, Trititum, Tesla's own GPU's, as they start failing, so the normal depreciation curve only "kinda applies here".
There is no interest, as he was venture funded not debt funded.
Electricity is coming from Nat Gas Turbines, so again even though you have a some depreciation on the equipment there, you are getting it for far below meter prices.
So, from my math, he gets ROI on the chips in 3 months, and ROI on the entire facility in 9 months? That's literally the best investment of all time.
But, crucially, there's a huge level of uncertainty. You're making bets on the relative cost of nat gas and grid power, both of which have historically shown extreme volatility over that sort of timescale.
The level of risk means that very few proposed schemes go ahead in full unless there's some other factor involved (lack of sufficient grid connectivity, availability of subsidies).
Who is "he"? SpaceX has $20bn of debt and $9bn in "other financing" corresponding to "obligations related to certain AI infrastructure assets recorded as failed sale-leaseback transactions."
I'll keep the below for integrity sake:
Well, i'm sure SpaceX bought Xai using some kind of prefered share/debt financing, but that's not to say that XAI had the original debt financing.
We can never know what the exact details, and the exact financing is on this debt. Maybe it's tied to Elon's Tesla Shares, Maybe it's tied to a convertible, maybe it is actual "loans" from a bank. Even at $9b in debt, and you naivly assume they are paying 10% (Def not 20% as OP claimed), you are paying $900m a year, for the entirety of xAi. Including that in the calculations to rent out the entire compute is folly. Not only is 900M not directly attributed to c1, cause it's split between c1, c2 and all the training runs, but you can never verify the interest. And even then, one month of this deal pays for the whole year of interest expense.
So go ahead and lower my estimate by 10%... doesn't make a difference.
If only there was some SEC filing available disclosing additional information about the 6-months $20bn bridge loan which was on the news four weeks ago…
Uh, starship is still a development program. There's 1 launch pad right now able to launch V3. No starship has flown with an actual live payload. The starlinks going out the PEZ dispenser are probably the only thing launching on it anytime soon.
Basically, Starship launching thousands of tons to orbit isn't constrained by money but by time.
But you are right to call out the launch infrastructure as the true bottleneck. They have 3 pads currently under development. So in 6-9 months they'll have 4 operational pads.
Also, how do they heat tiles hold up? How fast can they catch, refurbish and relaunch is what remains.
I'm confident, and will be putting my money where my mouth is (By investing in the IPO) that they will have useful orbital payloads this year.
The news from the S1 is that they're renting both (see OP).
Essentially, they are using most of C2 for Grok5. That training run is coming to an End, and they will be leasing more capacity. So taht 1.25b per month will go up to around $1.5B-$2B per month as they finish grok 5.
Edit: from cofounder of Anthropic: "will be scaling up on GB200 capacity in Colossus 2 throughout June." https://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375
So the 1.25B is for c1, and the revenue will scale into c2. No idea how much scale, but c2 is almost double the compute? So potentially $3b a month, but probably closer to $2.5B since they get a discount.