CHICKENPIE.An AI company just signed a deal to pay one hundred fifty million dollars. Every month. For the right to use someone else's chips.
Not a product. Not a finished thing. Just the electricity bill for the machines that will eventually make the finished thing.
This is where we are now.
Reflection AI—backed by Nvidia, named after something most tech bros skip entirely—is paying SpaceX $150 million a month to access Colossus 2, a Memphis data center packed with GB300 chips and enough ambient entitlement to power a small city. The math: $6.3 billion over 42 months. The math is also completely unhinged.
What does Reflection AI make? An AI model. That's the plan. Spend $150M/month on rented compute, build the thing, sell access to the thing, let the investors reverse-engineer the arithmetic. The company is reportedly valued at over $8 billion. The product hasn't shipped yet.
In Philippine terms, that's ₱8.6 billion a month. One metro Manila infrastructure budget. Approximately 430 million Jolly Spaghetti meals, accounting for current pasta prices.
We have startups here that close because the co-founders can't split ₱15,000/month rent. Founders pitching ₱500,000 pre-seeds to investors who ask for "a bit more traction first." Coworking spaces where the WiFi drops on the hour, then again three minutes after it comes back, because the router is also a startup and also underfunded.
And somewhere in Memphis, one company is spending more on compute rent in a single month than the entire Philippine startup ecosystem raised last year.
The global AI race is just big tech renting infrastructure from each other. Nvidia sells chips to SpaceX. SpaceX rents the chips to Reflection AI. Reflection AI builds something Nvidia's backers will eventually buy access to. It's a very expensive group project. Everyone is an investor in everyone else.
The rest of the world submits their homework on mobile data.
The chicken watches all of this from a cracked phone screen. The signal bar says "4G." It is lying.
At least the chips come with rice where she's from.
