$250M is easy if Indian IT industry dared to come together and pitch in to de-risk an existential crisis. Infosys alone bought back shares worth ~$200M in Nov 2025.
Why are Indian model makers having to pitch global VCs? The market is in India, and the capital is too!
To train a GPT class 1T model from scratch - including failed runs, data acq clean rlhf, post-training, team/people will likely req $250M of compute on an aggressive 3-4mo schedule (i.e. more reserved GPUs), $500-600M all-in IF you do a dense one. MoE fp8 will cut costs by 1/10th depending on how many active params you have. If you want SOTA however, the budgets go significantly higher on test-time compute, post-training RL, and data/synthetic generations..and v. high on talent. Maybe $2-4B all-in. After that comes serving the model. The talent is key to get to SOTA/beat it - and then you have to ensure this is useful enough to have inference vol over time - for which the capital will come if there is usage / TAM. So this is not as much about raising $50-60B, or raising it all at once as the OP says - we are investors in mistral, sarvam, reflection and anthropic - and they all scaled capital over time as models got adoption, but the early bottleneck is more on talent GPUs at that scale where you can do interesting things.