Leonid Zadorozhnykh @ProDoser: "Zuckerberg posted on X for..."

Finland

Zuckerberg posted on X for the first time since he launched Threads to compete with it. The reason: Meta’s first ever paid AI model. Within minutes Musk flipped the announcement into a free ad for X. The irony no one mentioned: X now sits inside the same empire as xAI and SpaceX, so Zuck picked his rival’s platform to launch a product that competes with his rival’s models. Here is the actual news underneath the theater. Meta put a price on a model for the first time. Muse Spark 1.1 runs on the new Meta Model API, and Zuckerberg frames the pricing as roughly a quarter of what OpenAI and Anthropic charge for comparable models. Ad revenue funds the AI arm, so Meta does not need to earn on tokens. It just needs cheap AI everywhere and developers locked into its ecosystem. That is a subsidized price war, and it lands hardest on the pure-play labs that live on token sales and funding rounds. Here is the part I keep coming back to. In a token price war, the token is not the scarce asset. Compute and power are. SpaceX now owns xAI and its Colossus supercomputer, and it has quietly turned that into a landlord business. Google reportedly pays around 920 million dollars a month for capacity. Anthropic signed a three year deal worth about 1.25 billion dollars a month. The labs building the frontier are paying rent to a direct rival. So look at the arc: 2023, Zuck leaves X and builds Threads to bury it. 2026, Zuck launches his new model on X. 2027, does Meta end up renting Colossus, or does it become the landlord itself? Both are live. Anthropic and Google already rent, for a combined 2.17 billion dollars a month, and Meta is reportedly exploring its own compute rental business. Here is how I think about it, and I suspect Musk does too. You do not need the best model on the market if every other model pays you a tax on compute. Grok is losing the model race and it barely matters, because Claude and Gemini are paying to run on Musk’s machines. That is why I stay positioned in the picks and shovels rather than betting on who tops the model leaderboard this month. Cheaper models pull in more usage, not less, and all of it runs on someone’s chips and someone’s grid. $NVDA (NVIDIA Corporation) $ASML (ASML Holding NV) $SPCX (Space Exploration Technologies Corp) $META (Meta Platforms Inc) benchmarked against $SPX500 So here is my question to you. In this cycle, would you rather own the best model, or the data center it runs in?

Not investment advice. The author may have financial interests in the mentioned instruments.