Yes, I am for real. The Colossus datacenter that xAI built cost $7 billion.

[1] https://www.globaldatacenterhub.com/p/can-elon-musks-7b-colo...

Most of that cost was presumably the 100,000 GPUs it contains, they didn't even build the building

Maybe, but in the end if the cost of launches is less than 10% the cost of the GPUs, then why is the project non-sense?

"If you give me 5 years and everything goes perfect, I can give you a system that's 9% worse than what you already have", you don't have a great investor pitch.