SpaceX Leases AI Supercomputer to Rival Anthropic After Musk Reversal

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has agreed to lease the full computing capacity of its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, to Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, months after Musk publicly accused Anthropic of harboring hostility toward Western civilization.

The agreement, announced May 6 and still in effect, gives Anthropic access to more than 300 megawatts of computing capacity across more than 220,000 Nvidia processors, according to statements from both companies. Anthropic said the added capacity would expand service for subscribers to its Claude Pro and Claude Max plans. SpaceX said Anthropic had also expressed interest in working with the rocket company on satellite-based data centers.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, its chief executive, and his sister, Daniela Amodei, its president, both former OpenAI executives. Musk co-founded SpaceX in 2002 and merged it earlier this year with xAI, the AI company he also founded, which produces the rival chatbot Grok.

From “misanthropic” to marquee customer

The Colossus 1 deal followed a sharp public reversal by Musk. In February, after Anthropic announced a $30 billion funding round at a reported $380 billion valuation, Musk wrote on social media platform X that Anthropic’s models were “misanthropic and evil,” alleging without providing examples that Claude showed bias against certain demographic groups. He returned to the theme days later, accusing the company of hostility toward Western civilization.

By May, Musk’s tone had changed. In a post on X the day the compute deal was announced, he said he had spent the preceding week with senior Anthropic staff. Musk wrote that the people he met were competent and appeared to care about doing the right thing, and that none of them set off what he called his “evil detector.” He added that SpaceX reserved the right to reclaim the computing capacity if Anthropic’s technology were used in ways that harmed humanity.

Musk said he was comfortable leasing out Colossus 1 because SpaceX’s own AI training work had already shifted to a newer facility, Colossus 2, which had come online after xAI was absorbed into SpaceX earlier this year.

A commercial rationale

Bloomberg News reported in June, citing people familiar with the matter, that SpaceX’s decision to rent out Colossus 1 followed technical difficulties in using the site for its own AI training. According to that report, the company had planned to link Colossus 1 with two other data center campuses more than ten miles away to train advanced models, but ran into latency problems compounded by older networking equipment. Anthropic and SpaceX have not confirmed that account, and it could not be independently corroborated beyond the Bloomberg report and outlets that cited it.

Financial terms were not disclosed when the deal was announced. Anthropic later agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for compute access across SpaceX’s Colossus and Colossus II facilities, a sum reported at roughly $45 billion over three years, according to financial media reports citing people familiar with the arrangement. Fortune separately reported the same monthly figure and said SpaceX struck a comparable deal with Google for a smaller allocation of processors weeks later, part of a broader push by SpaceX to sell unused computing capacity to AI developers.

SpaceX completed its stock market debut in late June at a per-share price of $135, according to a report from Euronews, in an offering that industry reporting characterized as the largest of its kind to date. Shares opened at around $150 on the first day of trading and rose further before settling, and the stock was trading near its offering price as of late August.

Background: xAI’s Memphis buildout and local objections

SpaceX’s compute business rests on infrastructure originally built for xAI, which launched Colossus 1 in September 2024 at a converted Electrolux factory in South Memphis. The company came under scrutiny from local environmental groups and Memphis officials over its use of dozens of gas-fired turbines to power the site while it awaited a permanent connection to the regional electric grid.

The Commercial Appeal, a Memphis newspaper, reported that xAI’s subsidiary sought a permit from the Shelby County Health Department for around-the-clock operation of 15 gas turbines through 2030, and that the turbines’ self-reported emissions of hazardous air pollutants exceeded a federal annual threshold for a single source, according to the outlet’s review of permit filings. The newspaper reported that roughly 22,000 people live within five miles of the facility. The Southern Environmental Law Center, representing local community groups, has said it notified the Environmental Protection Agency of its intent to sue over turbines it said were operating without proper permits; xAI has not publicly responded in detail to those specific claims. Memphis Mayor Paul Young has defended the project’s economic benefits for the area, while local advocacy groups continue to raise concerns about air quality and water use tied to the expanding data center campus.

What follows

Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI have each been reported to be considering initial public offerings, though none besides SpaceX had completed one as of this writing. The scale of the Colossus arrangement, and the broader web of compute-leasing deals SpaceX has struck with Anthropic and Google, remains a developing element of SpaceX’s business ahead of further public disclosures. The precise financial terms of the original Anthropic agreement have not been confirmed directly by either company, and the extent of any plans for satellite-based AI data centers remains unconfirmed beyond the companies’ stated interest.

Sources

Reporting draws on company statements carried by wire and financial press, one Memphis newspaper’s review of public permit filings as reported by a technology outlet, and financial media reporting on deal terms and the SpaceX stock offering.

Wire services and financial press

• CNBC, “Anthropic, SpaceX announce compute deal that includes space development.” cnbc.com
• Yahoo Finance / Bloomberg, “SpaceX Leases Colossus 1 Data Center to Anthropic After Internal AI Hurdles.” finance.yahoo.com
• Yahoo Finance, “Anthropic to rent all AI capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus data center.” finance.yahoo.com
• Fortune, “Beyond rockets and satellites, SpaceX is quietly building an AI compute business.” fortune.com
• Euronews, “Anthropic IPO: five things to know before its Wall Street debut.” euronews.com
• Data Center Dynamics, “Anthropic to use all of SpaceX-xAI’s Colossus 1 data center compute.” datacenterdynamics.com
• Reuters (via syndication partner), reporting by Jeffrey Dastin and Aditya Soni on the SpaceX-Anthropic data center agreement.

Background on Musk’s earlier criticism

• The Hill, “Musk labels Anthropic as ‘misanthropic and evil.'” thehill.com
• eWeek, “Elon Musk Slams Anthropic AI as ‘Evil’ After $380B Valuation.” eweek.com

Local reporting on Memphis facility (via secondary citation)

• TechCrunch, citing The Commercial Appeal’s review of Shelby County Health Department permit filings. techcrunch.com

Editor’s note on sourcing Bloomberg’s account of the technical reasons behind SpaceX’s decision to lease out Colossus 1 rests on unnamed sources cited by that outlet and was not corroborated elsewhere; it is presented here as a reported claim, not confirmed fact. The reported $1.25 billion-per-month, $45 billion three-year valuation of the compute agreement was not confirmed directly by Anthropic or SpaceX and is attributed to financial media reporting. Details of the original May 6 xAI-to-SpaceX gas turbine permit dispute are drawn from a technology outlet’s citation of a Memphis newspaper rather than from that newspaper directly, and should be verified against The Commercial Appeal’s original reporting where a subscription allows access.