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Why Most CIOs Are Quietly Praying for Retirement — And the Few Who Aren’t Are About to Get Very Rich I had a moment this week where I was sitting across from a Director of IT and it hit me — this poor bastard has the toughest job in the entire company. The business folks get to be full-time dreamers: “Hey, can we automate this? Can the AI just know what to do? Can it walk my dog while I’m in this meeting?” Meanwhile he’s over there thinking about data security, system reliability, whether some employee is gonna click on an email that says “You’ve won a $1,000 Walmart gift card!”, whether Ukrainian hackers are going to steal their customer data at 2 a.m., and whether his entire team is about to get replaced by three interns and ChatGPT — all while knowing none of this stuff actually works the way the brochures promised. And here’s the part that makes me feel for the guy — for his entire career he’s been rewarded for keeping the machines running and not getting fired. Now we’re asking him to suddenly become a profit center, to be out over his skis with AI initiatives. It’s like telling the hall monitor he’s now responsible for running the company’s underground poker game. Did I just compare our AI software to an underground poker game? Yeah, probably not the best analogy, but hang with me here, I’m rolling. Meanwhile the C-suite is over there wondering why nothing’s happened yet, completely oblivious to the fact that they’ve spent twenty years brutally punishing IT for not playing defense. Hell, I know CIOs who got fired because Windows 95 sucked. The real kicker is how to even get started. Our philosophy has always been to start small — automate one workflow, prove it works, and then compound fast. Smart in theory. In practice, with a big organization, that feels like bringing a birthday candle to a forest fire. The C-suite doesn’t get excited about incremental. They want to see something that actually moves the needle. So you’re stuck trying to thread this ridiculous gap: build something small enough to actually work, get real user adoption, and make sure the vendor isn’t full of shit. Honestly, I don’t envy that seat one bit. At Collide, we’re committed to being real partners with the folks actually doing the building. I’ve got serious scar tissue from getting fired for not being “openly collaborative” with other oil and gas companies on well spacing back in the shale days, and I’m never making that mistake again. We’re gonna share what we learn, educate when we can, and actually listen — God knows we have a lot to learn too. Truth is, my tech guys are dying to find some partners in crime — and I really gotta stop with the crime analogies, I swear that’s not what we’re doing here — because they get all excited explaining the latest and greatest AI breakthrough and I respond with the technical sophistication of a man asking if his rotary phone has Bluetooth. Sip slowly, my friends.

Why did xAI hand over a 220,000-GPU cluster to Anthropic? The technical backdrop to xAI's decision to hand Colossus 1 over to Anthropic in its entirety is more interesting than it appears. xAI deployed more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs at its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. Of these, roughly 150,000 are estimated to be H100s, 50,000 H200s, and 20,000 GB200s. In other words, three different generations of silicon are mixed together inside a single cluster — a "heterogeneous architecture." For distributed training, however, this configuration is close to a disaster, according to engineers familiar with the setup. In distributed training, 100,000 GPUs must finish a single step simultaneously before the cluster can advance to the next one. Even if the GB200s finish their computation first, the remaining 99,999 chips have to wait for the slower H100s — or for any GPU that has hit a stack-related snag — to catch up. This is known as the straggler effect. The 11% GPU utilization rate (MFU: the share of theoretical FLOPs actually realized) at xAI recently reported by The Information can be read as the numerical fallout of this problem. It stands in stark contrast to the 40%-plus MFU figures achieved by Meta and Google. The problem runs deeper still. As discussed earlier, NVIDIA's NCCL has traditionally been optimized for a ring topology. It works beautifully at the 1,000–10,000 GPU scale, but once you push into the 100,000-unit range, the latency of data traversing the ring once around becomes punishingly long. GPUs need to churn through computations rapidly to keep MFU high, but while they sit waiting endlessly for data to arrive over the network fabric, more than half of the silicon falls into idle. Google sidestepped this bottleneck with its own custom topology (Google's OCS: Apollo/Palomar), but xAI, by my read, has not yet reached that stage. Layer Blackwell's (GB200) "power smoothing" issue on top, and the picture comes into focus. According to Zeeshan Patel, formerly in charge of multimodal pre-training at xAI, Blackwell GPUs draw power so aggressively that the chip itself includes a hardware feature for smoothing power delivery. xAI's existing software stack, however, was optimized for Hopper and does not understand the characteristics of the new hardware; when it imposes irregular loads on the chip, the silicon physically destructs — literally melts. That means the modeling stack must be rewritten from scratch, which in turn means scaling is far harder than most of us imagine. Pulling all of this together points to a single conclusion. xAI judged that training frontier models on Colossus 1 simply was not efficient enough to be worthwhile. It therefore moved its own training workloads wholesale onto Colossus 2, built as a 100% Blackwell homogeneous cluster. Colossus 1, on the other hand — whose mixed architecture is far less crippling for inference, which parallelizes more forgivingly — was leased in its entirety to an Anthropic that desperately needed inference capacity. Many observers point to what looks like a contradiction: Elon Musk poured enormous capital into building Colossus, only to hand the core asset over to a direct competitor in Anthropic. Others read it as xAI capitulating because it is a "middling frontier lab." But these are surface-level reads. Look at the numbers and a different picture emerges. xAI today holds roughly 550,000+ GPUs in total (on an H100-equivalent performance basis), and Colossus 1 (220,000 units) accounts for only about 40% of the total available capacity. Colossus 2 — built entirely on Blackwell — is already operational and continuing to expand. Elon kept the all-Blackwell homogeneous cluster (Colossus 2) for himself and leased out the older, mixed-generation Colossus 1. In other words, he handed the pain of rewriting the stack — the MFU-11% debacle — to Anthropic, while keeping his own focus on training the next generation of models. The real point, then, is this. Elon's objective appears to be positioning ahead of the SpaceXAI IPO at a $1.75 trillion valuation, currently floated for as early as June. The narrative SpaceXAI now needs is that xAI — long the "sore finger" — is not merely a research lab burning cash, but a business with a "neo-cloud" model in the mold of AWS, capable of leasing surplus assets at high yields. From a cost-of-capital perspective, an "AGI cash incinerator" is far less attractive to investors than a "data-center landlord generating cash." As noted above, the most important detail of the Colossus 1 lease is that it is for inference, not training. Unlike training, inference requires far less tightly synchronized inter-GPU communication. Even when the chips are heterogeneous, the workload parcels out cleanly across them in parallel. The straggler effect — the chief weakness of a mixed cluster — is essentially neutralized for inference workloads. Furthermore, with Anthropic occupying all 220,000 GPUs as a single tenant, the network-switch jitter (unanticipated latency) that arises under multi-tenancy disappears. The two sides' technical weaknesses end up complementing each other almost exactly. One insight follows. As a training cluster mixing H100/H200/GB200, Colossus 1 was an asset that could only deliver an MFU of 11%. The moment it was handed over to a single inference customer, however, that asset transformed into a cash-flow asset rented out at roughly $2.60 per GPU-hour (a weighted average of the lease rates across GPU types). For xAI, what was a "cluster from hell" for training has become a "golden goose" minting $5–6 billion in annual revenue when redeployed for inference. Elon's genius, I would argue, lies not in the model but in this asset-rotation structure. The weight of that $6 billion becomes clearer when set against xAI's income statement. Annualizing xAI's 1Q26 net loss yields roughly $6 billion in losses per year. The $5–6 billion in annual revenue generated by leasing Colossus 1 to Anthropic, in other words, almost perfectly hedges xAI's loss figure. This single deal effectively pulls xAI to break-even. Heading into the SpaceXAI IPO, this functions as a core line of financial defense. From a cost-of-capital standpoint, if the image shifts from "research lab burning cash" to "infrastructure tollgate stably printing $6 billion a year," the entire tone of the offering can change. (May 8, 2026, Mirae Asset Securities)

✨Dear Commandant, thank you for meeting Liv at the Honeymee × PGR collab last Saturday 🩵every moment with you felt warm and precious!💗✨ #punishinggrayraven# #cosplay# #pgrcosplay# #livlimpidity# #pgrliv# #honeymee# #honeyfrosttouch#