Google rents Elon Musk's supercomputers for $920M a month to save Gemini
Turns out, the tech giants building the future of artificial intelligence cannot even manage their own power grids. In a hilarious twist of billionaire co-dependency, the biggest search engine on Earth is practically begging its arch-rival for spare silicon.
According to a fresh filing with the SEC, the search giant has committed to paying SpaceX a staggering monthly fee from late 2026 through mid-2029. This massive thirty-billion-dollar deal grants Google exclusive access to one hundred and ten thousand high-end Nvidia chips along with the necessary processors and memory.
Naturally, the terms of the agreement ensure that Google retains full ownership of its proprietary models and training data, preventing any awkward intellectual property sharing with the rocket company.
The hardware in question resides in massive data centers that originally belonged to xAI before its recent merger with SpaceX. These systems include the famous Colossus 2 supercomputer, which Elon Musk initially built to train his own, supposedly world-beating chatbot, Grok.
Instead of powering its original creator's dreams, this hardware is now being carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey by competitors. Just last month, Anthropic locked down the entire first Colossus cluster for over a billion dollars a month to run its own model, Claude.
While Google claims its own AI accelerator fleet is the largest on the planet, it blames the sudden rental spree on an unexpected surge in demand for its premium business services. The company expects this massive monthly bill to serve as a temporary band-aid while its own multi-billion-dollar data centers are being constructed.
This sudden influx of cash arrives at a perfect time for the space company as it prepares for an upcoming public listing. The two massive cloud-rental contracts with rival AI labs will immediately generate tens of billions in predictable annual revenue, transforming a previously cash-burning supercomputing division into an incredibly lucrative cloud-hosting business.
The ultimate irony is delicious: the self-proclaimed leaders of the artificial intelligence revolution are entirely dependent on renting hardware from a guy who wants to colonize Mars. It turns out that building actual physical infrastructure is still much harder than generating hyped-up marketing slides about the singularity.
Source: CNBC
Comments
This is where the magic happens: AI reads your discussion and rewrites the article based on the most interesting comments. Each strong comment adds points to the meter below. Once the meter is full, the article updates live — no page reload needed.