alt Hacker NewsMaybe compute is the real moat (chinese possibly skip around it with distillation), xai is buildouts have been insanely fast (colossus 1 - 100,000 H100 GPUs brought online in 122 days lol) so maybe that explains them catching up
asked grok to give a compute estimate for each: - SpaceX / xAI: ~1.4 GW (owned Colossus clusters) - OpenAI: ~2–3 GW (mostly rented/cloud) - Anthropic: ~1.5–2.5 GW (multi-cloud + xAI lease)
chatgpt estimates a lower: - OpenAI: ~1.5M H100-eq ± ~0.8M - Anthropic: ~1.4M H100-eq ± ~0.7M - SpaceX/xAI: ~0.6M H100-eq ± ~0.3M
but it felt obligated to mention that "for single tightly interconnected NVIDIA training clusters, SpaceX/xAI has been unusually strong."
Replies
we are in the process of transitioning from hype to commodity with llm tokens, moats are typically at the top of the stack or in the data warehouse
> Maybe compute is the real moat (chinese possibly skip around it with distillation)
Makes no sense. At this point, all Western AI companies also engage in distillation. If distillation were such magic, they'd be insane not to.