Seems like an excellent exit strategy in hindsight. Spend a gazillion dollars of investor money on AMD hardware, get bought back by AMD because you worked out how to use that hardware

Except the EU paid for the hardware https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/supercomputers/our-supercompute...

Where in that source does it claim that Silo didn't have to pay to use the hardware?

I don’t think it is possible to pay for access to LUMI. I know my company has been in talks about getting free access as it sits under utilized most of the time. These supercomputers are mostly vanity projects for EU politicians, there is no commercial use case.

I don't know about Lumi specifically, but top tier scientific supercomputers should typically have 80+% utilisation rate:

https://doku.lrz.de/usage-statistics-for-supermuc-ng-1148309...

Smaller machines will tend lower from what i have seen. If you give a large enough pool of scientists access to significant compute resources, they will generally figure out how to saturate them. Also, scientific teams often can't pay top software engineers. Lots of hardware is a way to compensate for inefficient code. If Lumi is underutilized to such an extent someone is funking up.

There is of course no commercial use case for these computers. That's not the point of these machines.

Came here to point this out. Silo never had to invest huge amounts on GPUs. A shrewd move by the founders.

There is debate about public investment into private ventures, but in this case it may provide long term benefits to Finland

Even better!

An inverse Nadella, wherein you buy a chunk of OpenAI and they turn around and buy a bunch of Azure time (then give it away to people on ChatGPT cuz ain't no one about making money in that business)

Well actually it was Silo + Turku University's TurkuNLP group [1]

[1] https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/resources/c...