Anthropic has struck a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to access computing power from its Colossus 1 data centre, adding to the AI start-up’s web of deals as it seeks enough capacity to run its popular models.
AI startup Anthropic has signed a deal for computing power from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as it looks to secure enough capacity to run its popular models, using the company’s Colossus 1 data center.The maker of the Claude AI said Wednesday it will use more than 300 megawatts of processing power at SpaceX’s colossal Tennessee data center, which houses hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge Nvidia processors.
The data center deal comes as Anthropic seeks new computing power suppliers to run its models to keep pace with its growth. It has raised tens of billions of dollars this year, mostly for infrastructure, and signed deals with Google and Amazon.
The Anthropic partnership with SpaceX, which recently teamed up with Musk’s AI lab xAI, is another thread in the tangled web of deals between the biggest players in data centers, chips and AI model development.
Musk said on Wednesday that xAI will be “dissolved” as a separate company and that its AI products will now be called SpaceXAI.
The news arrives as Musk is locked in a legal battle with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the primary competitor of Anthropic. Musk told a jury last week that Altman and the ChatGPT maker “stole a charity” by turning the AI lab into a $850 billion for-profit company instead of making sure AI will benefit humanity.
Musk wrote on X on Wednesday:
“I spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity and was impressed. No one set off my evil detector. So long as they engage in critical self-examination, Claude will probably be good. After that, I was ok leasing Colossus 1 to Anthropic, as SpaceXAI had already moved training to Colossus 2,”.
Musk’s xAI, a rival to OpenAI and Anthropic for the creation of the newest models, has moved fast to expand its data centers. In 2024, the billionaire built the Colossus data center near Memphis to run his own AI models, Grok. Additionally, Musk’s business intends to construct the “Terafab,” a massive chip manufacturing facility.
SpaceX may invest $55 billion in the first stage of a “semiconductor manufacturing facility,” totaling $119 billion, according to a local notice in Grimes County, Texas on Wednesday.
However, Grok’s utilization is not as high as that of rivals like Claude and ChatGPT, so Musk formed alliances with them to make use of the extra capacity.
In addition to securing the right to acquire Cursor for $60 billion this year, SpaceX last month reached an unconventional agreement with Cursor to grant the startup access to processing capacity and collaborate with it on AI technologies.
Anthropic declared it would increase rate limitations on its most sophisticated Opus models and usage limits on its Claude Code tool in order to better serve its models thanks to SpaceX’s enhanced capacity.
Despite Anthropic’s recent public spat with the Pentagon over restrictions on the military’s use of its technology, the agreement with Musk, a significant contributor to President Donald Trump’s campaign, was reached.
The SpaceX deal expands Anthropic’s recent data center deals, which include a similar-scale arrangement with Google and Broadcom and up to 5 gigawatts with Amazon. Additionally, it reached an agreement with Microsoft and Nvidia that allows the software giant’s Azure cloud division to deliver $30 billion in capacity.
Additionally, as SpaceX gets ready for a huge IPO, it will increase the use of its AI infrastructure. In reference to Musk’s intentions to launch data centers into space, Anthropic stated that the agreement includes a deal to investigate “partnering with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”
SpaceX said:
“The compute required to train and operate the next generation of these systems is outpacing what terrestrial power, land and cooling can deliver on the timelines that matter.”
