Elon Musk's SpaceX Moves and AI Politics

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Today on the podcast, SpaceX is committing $2.8 billion to gas turbines for XAI data centers. This is all according to their IPO filings. Google is now pitching an AI agent ecosystem, but a lot of people are criticizing the fact that they are keeping this paywall behind a $100 a month paywall. Trump has delayed any AI security executive orders that were previously being worked on, and he essentially is doing this because he is citing US competitiveness concerns with China.
Hark has just raised $700 million in a Series A at a $6 billion valuation for an AI personal assistant, which doesn't sound too differentiated. We're going to get into how they're able to raise $700 million.
Anthropic expects that they are going to have their first profitable quarter at $10.9 billion in Q2 revenue. That is absolutely insane, considering how much money these companies are spending, and OpenAI feels like they are far from profitable. Everyone's racing towards the IPO and coming in with a profitable quarter could be a pretty exciting moment for Anthropic. So let's get into all of it on the podcast today. The first thing I want to talk about is the SpaceX gas turbines. They've committed $2.8 billion to purchase turbines through 2029, which are going to power XAI's data centers. This is all according to their IPO filings. This basically solves the immediate power shortage, but there's a whole bunch of legal lawsuits coming from the NAACP. They're suing over 27 allegedly unpermitted generators at the Colossus 2 data center in Mississippi. Well, that lawsuit in particular is a little bit controversial because sure, you can sue a company for emissions, but the NAACP typically is launching lawsuits that are defending people of color, and the lawsuit basically says that the data centers are disproportionately harming people of color, and a lot of people are basically saying this is sort of a politicized lawsuit. We'll see where that goes. SpaceX apparently has signed $805 million for a turbine deal in March of this year, and they have a $2 billion mobile turbine agreement in the late April that they just signed. Both of those are covering equipment all the way through 2029 Colossus Suit 2 now powers 46 portable turbines, and the NAACP lawsuit alleges that 27 of them lack required air permits and pose public health risks.
SpaceX right now is important to know that they're currently leasing their Colossus server to Anthropic for $15 billion annually, and they plan additional third-party leasing deals to drive revenue. So this is something that not only are they using to train XAI, but when they're not training XAI with it, and I think Colossus 2 is what they're using for XAI, but Colossus 1 was kind of the older one. So they have, you know, that's not currently being trained. They're just giving this out to other companies like Anthropic, and who knows, maybe OpenAI or Google or other players, although Elon Musk and OpenAI don't have the friendliest relationship. But still, $15 billion annually to give the Colossus, one plant over to Anthropic is definitely a major driver of revenue for them. This is all important because SpaceX right now is betting that vertically integrating the infrastructure, right? So owning the data center, owning the power, owning the AI units is going to be renting from cloud providers like Anthropic and OpenAI currently do. Google, Microsoft, AWS, all of them are making a killing on this. Meanwhile, SpaceX has basically built their own to train their own models, and then they're renting it over to Anthropic for $15 billion a year. But in order to do that, they had to get these up very quickly. Gas turbines were the fastest way to do that without having to, you know, plug into the grid and get all of the permits to be grid powered. So that's kind of the big constraint. Now there's lawsuits that might make that all get shut down. Google is now pitching an AI agent ecosystem. Google IO just happened, which is super exciting. I'll be talking to someone at Google tomorrow for more news on everything that was announced there. But for this particular AI agent ecosystem they've announced, they have information agents, they have one called Spark, Halo and Daily Brief. But all of those, while they sound super useful and interesting, are locked behind a $100 a month Gemini Ultra Paywall. Instead of, you know, offering free access or even the $20 a month access, you gotta pay 100 bucks a month. It's pretty, it's hard. I feel like we're seeing Claude made just so much money for their $100 and $200 a month tier. And ChatGPD always had a $200 a month tier, but there was no way I was paying for it, mostly because their product wasn't good enough. Actually, I did pay for their $200 a month tier last year at some point to try their agents. Their agents weren't good enough. I canceled it. But now that Anthropix Cowork and Claude Code are good enough to do everything I ever wanted, why would I ever cancel? And I'm happy to pay the $200 a month. It looks like Google wants to get in on this kind of like higher tier $100 a month thing, but these agents are kind of use agents that have one particular use or a few different particular uses. It's not like Claude Cowork that can literally do anything and everything and do it all well. I even have Claude Cowork going, looking at WAV files and editing, you know, music projects on something like Logic or going to Xcode on Apple and building iOS apps. Like it's just so insane what it can do. And so for me, I'm thrilled to pay that, but I'm not sure I would go and pay $100 to use Spark, Halo or Daily Brief. So anyways, I'm excited for what the direction Google's moving in, but they're going to have to build something comparable to, and maybe they will and they do, but like that's what I would, something's got to be comparable to Cowork. That's the only thing I'm going to be paying that much money for. I don't really care about people's little agents. I could probably build my own with Cowork if I wanted to pay that extra money. And it is tricky because, you know, while $200 a month, I say I get such an insane amount of value out of it, but I'm not going to stack a bunch of $200 a month subscriptions on top of each other. So Google really has to differentiate themselves and make themselves better than Cowork, and I will cancel Cowork and move to them if they have something better. That's kind of the place they have to be at. So this is definitely reversing Google's kind of historical playbook, right? They've always been releasing consumer products that are free, and they're trying to do that to gain adoption. What these particular agents do, the information agents, they're replacing Google Alerts with a 24-7 AI monitoring for market trends, price tracking, weather. Spark is actually going to integrate with Gmail and Docs. It's kind of a personal assistant. Halo is going to sit as an Android notification layer.