“According to people familiar with the matter, Stability’s commitment to pay for Amazon Web Services, which he guaranteed against his own personal wealth, was $75 million.”
Stability raised $100 million in October, and a massive AWS bill came due right behind it. Now it wants a round at a $4 billion valuation, while it still has not shipped a model it built from scratch. Stable Diffusion came largely from researchers in Munich and from Runway. Stability paid the compute bill and took the name.