I think no one believes that R1 costs $5.5m from scratch. People in this project (most, not all) are very aware of the realities in training and are very well connected in the US as well. Besides Leonardo there are JUWELS, LUMI & other which can be used for ablations and so on.

This will never compete with what the frontier labs have (+ are building) but might be just enough for something, that is close enough to be a useful alternative :).

PS: Huge fan of Latent Space :)