arXiv:2610.08701v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the probability that Gaussian elimination with partial pivoting on $n \times n$ random matrices has growth $\rho$ is at least inverse quasi-polynomial: $\Omega(\exp(-c \log^2 (\rho)\log(n)))$ for some constant $c > 0$. This lower bound breaks standard conjectures in the smoothed and average-case analysis of Gaussian elimination. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first non-trivial lower bound on the probability of large growth for Gaussian random matrices.