Comment by tristanj
13 hours ago
That's very doubtful given recent news that Colossus is running at 11% capacity and has hundreds of thousands of idle GPUs. xAI acquired too many GPUs and currently doesn't have enough customers to use them. That's why they are making compute deals with Anthropic and Cursor.
xAI is bleeding money and this compute deal with Anthropic will pay for all of xAI's capex ($25 billion) in 2 years.
11% MFU does not mean 89% of GPUs are idle, it means that they're using the GPUs ineffectively.
11% capacity is not 11% MFU. The first is about actually using the hardware for something in the first place, the latter is about how efficiently you compute. Different things.
The post you’re referring to doesn’t even include “89%” or “idle”. I’m not sure I understand the point you’re making then rebutting.
The original post of 11% is referring to leaked numbers about _MFU_, which has erroneously been re-reported as fraction of GPUs being used at all. The parent post is trying to correct this misconception.
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This might actually be worse from a power costs standpoint.
> will pay for all of xAI's capex ($25 billion) in 2 years
This is a confusing framing; you pay down capex with profit not revenue, and there is presumably a high opex cost.
Nevertheless, you are still talking about 15B / year - when the initial investment was < 30B. That investment also probably covers things like power, salaries, etc.
So you are still covering all of that.
> That investment also probably covers things like power, salaries, etc.
That does not seem probable to me, other than for the initial build-out.
free cash flow pays down capex