Anthropic strikes compute deal with SpaceX for Colossus 1 access

Anthropic and SpaceX announced a partnership giving Anthropic access to Colossus 1, the Memphis, Tennessee data centre xAI had built to train Grok, adding more than 300 megawatts of capacity and over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs — a mix of H100, H200 and newer GB200 accelerators — to Anthropic’s compute. Anthropic said the extra capacity let it immediately raise limits for Claude users: doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits across its Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans, removing a peak-hours limit reduction for Pro and Max accounts, and substantially raising API rate limits for its Opus models. The companies also said they had discussed jointly developing orbital AI compute capacity.

The financial terms were not disclosed at announcement. They emerged two weeks later from SpaceX’s S-1 filing ahead of a public offering, which showed Anthropic had committed to paying xAI $1.25 billion a month for the capacity, running through May 2029 with a discount during the first two months of ramp-up and a 90-day termination clause for either side — a deal SpaceX said could bring xAI more than $40 billion over its term. SpaceX described the arrangement as a way to monetise spare compute capacity in its own infrastructure and said it expected to pursue similar contracts elsewhere. The deal illustrated how tightly compute supply and rival labs’ commercial interests had become entangled: Anthropic, an xAI competitor in the consumer chatbot market, was now a major paying customer of xAI’s infrastructure.