Google, of all companies, much vaunted (as in your comment!) for its huge infrastructure footprint, is renting compute from SpaceX to the tune of almost a billion a month: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/05/google-will-pay-spacex-920...
This is in addition to bumping their CapEx spend to the extent their cash flow turned negative for the first time ever this quarter: https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/07/google-just-had-its-f...
The world doesn’t realize how desperately compute-crunched hyperscalers are to meet AI demand.
This is a better problem to have than SpaceX, which is renting out capacity obviously because it’s own AI products aren’t selling.
$12B/year is nothing to a company that makes 11x as much in profit. The question is whether that $12B can be turned into more profit.
A deal with a company Google has a share of, announced a week before their IPO, with very non-committal terms and ramp period protections delivered in one large block on short term notice priced likely at the high end of what Google charges for A4X instances anyway.
I don’t think this reflects desperation as much as strategy.
I dunno if it's a sound strategy that involves repeatedly telling investors [1] and employees [2] over multiple quarters that you are desperate for compute, including leaving a triple-digit billion backlog on the table [3], and then spending so much on CapEx that you have your first negative cash flow quarter ever and taking the inevitable hit to the stock [4], while turning away a large paying customer (who also happen to be a competitor) [5] ;-)
[1] https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/sundar-pichai-google-compute-...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/21/google-must-double-ai-servin...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-22/google-sa...
[4] https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/07/google-just-had-its-f...
[5] https://thenextweb.com/news/google-caps-meta-gemini-compute-...
This move was purely to pump up SpaceX stock price at its current absurd valuation b/c Google owns something like 6% of SpaceX
By your own math, doing this would have required SpaceX stock to go up $200B just to break even, and then Google would have to liquidate it.