Fake __AI__ revenue. Maybe Hetzner should build Colossus4, rent it out and book it as AI revenue instead of hardware rental revenue and get a P/E of 100.
Anthropic this quarter will have revenue of $10.9B, up from $4.8B last quarter[0]. They're paying SpaceX $1.25B per month for compute[1] - which is more than what SpaceX earn on space. SpaceX spent about $30-40B in capex on Colossus 1 & 2.
This is all real revenue, real spend, real usage.
Hetzner just aren't at this scale. Not even close. If they wanted to get into this business - first, they're late. Second, it's at a scale of ~10x of their total lifetime datacenter buildout. Third, they'd need to change their business to being one that is debt fronted.
xAI have proven out that being able to deploy compute is a very viable business (and difficult to pull off)
At some point AI cynicism clashes with reality, it must be exhausting maintaining it.
"I'm an investor, the founder of new alchemy, co-founder Lamina1, former CEO of coinlab.com, Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, Ethereum security researcher, holder of patent 9298806, general nerd. Currently working at Capital6, my private equity fund."
You poor misunderstood Bitcoin booster! Now you have to deal with AI critics! How about getting a real job?
Jesus Christ, the Hetzner example is obviously an example of booking revenue as AI revenue (where investors assume it is generated by Grok subscriptions) vs. hardware rental revenue, which traditionally not valued as highly.
Nowhere does the hypothetical state that Hetzner, an example for hardware rental, has the funding or the capabilities to execute the sarcastic example.
But ok, now hardware rentals have a P/E of 100 or more.
Investors aren’t dumb. These numbers are being reported and the fact that the data centers are being rented out is publicly disclosed everywhere. Investors know full well that the revenue is from the data center rental. No (non-retail) investor is going to see the jump in revenue and think “I better buy up because grok must be kicking ass!”
And yes, if hetzner built a massive AI hyper scale datacenter and rented it out for billions, with the expectation that they would keep building more, they would also see massive PE ratios because it’s expected that their revenue would be going up.
Anthropic’s revenue is computed different from OpenAI. As I recall, they inflate it by including money that they end up just paying forward to some of the companies they depend on. OpenAI doesn’t count that component. And none of these companies - including SpaceX - have trustworthy accounting.
You’re falling for the Musk shell game. He just says whatever is convenient at any given moment. FSD. Funding secured. I talked to the Claude guys.
He didn’t change his mind about anything. It’s just that he wants to prop up SpaceX’s IPO as much as he can. Plus if he hits various targets, he unlocks more shares for himself, I think.
But booking outrageous rental fees as fake AI revenue ahead of the SpaceX IPO apparently takes precedence.