It's widely known that Musk was livid when OpenAI achieved success.

As an initial investor in OpenAI, Musk poured in over $100 million and positioned the organization as a non-profit entity aimed at benefiting humanity.

However, OpenAI eventually ousted Musk from its board, revoked all his shares and voting rights, completely severing his control. Moreover, OpenAI's core team advocated for commercialization, establishing a for-profit subsidiary.

This infuriated Musk, prompting him to later found his own AI firm, xAI, to challenge OpenAI.

Musk's xAI introduced Grok to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT, lured numerous personnel from OpenAI, and, with his vast wealth, acquired a massive quantity of GPUs from NVIDIA.

Indeed, Musk's xAI boasts the world's largest GPU chip inventory, with over 1 million GPUs, surpassing tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.

Nevertheless, despite its GPU abundance, Musk's Grok underperformed.

It couldn't match the capabilities of ChatGPT or Anthropic, relegating it to the second tier with a small user base and monthly losses. Data indicates that since its inception (2023–2026), xAI has incurred approximately $13 billion in losses (around 88 billion RMB).

Consequently, many of Musk's GPUs remained underutilized. Media reports suggest that although xAI possesses over 1 million GPUs, its compute utilization rate may dip below 12%, leaving the remaining 88% idle and necessitating constant maintenance—a substantial expense.

Thus, Grok consistently bled money without generating any revenue, leading the founding team to depart as they saw no future.

Subsequently, Musk announced that xAI would be fully integrated into SpaceX and cease to operate as an independent entity.

He then leased 220,000 GPUs from its data center, Colossus 1, to his former rival Claude for $1.25 billion per month, roughly $15 billion annually, with a contract extending until 2029. The GPU leasing alone is projected to generate $45 billion (about 300 billion RMB).

Not only that, but recently, Musk leased additional GPUs to another competitor, Google.

This time, Musk plans to lease approximately 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, along with CPUs, memory, and other related components, to Google for $920 million per month. Given the fewer GPUs leased compared to Claude, the price is marginally lower.

The contract spans nearly three years, from October 2026 to June 2029, totaling $29.44 billion (about 199.18 billion RMB).

In essence, by leasing these GPUs alone, Musk stands to directly receive nearly 500 billion RMB in revenue over the next three years.

One must acknowledge Musk's astute business acumen.

After suffering significant losses in AI ventures and recognizing that his AI couldn't compete with industry behemoths like OpenAI, Google, and Claude, further investment would only exacerbate the losses—a veritable black hole.

Hence, he cut his losses, activated his assets, and abandoned the pursuit of AI, instead transforming into a compute power lessor. This strategy enables him to earn 500 billion over three years, a far cry from the monthly losses of hundreds of millions in AI ventures, wouldn't you agree?