It wasn't a lie, it was a misrepresentation of the total cost. It's not hard to calculate the cost of the training though. It takes 6 * active parameters * tokens flops[1]. To get number of seconds you can divide by Flops/s * MFU, where MFU is around 45% for H100 for large enough models[2].
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361
[2]: https://github.com/facebookresearch/lingua