Anthropic Gets in Bed With SpaceX as the AI Race Turns Weird

Anthropic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX said on Wednesday that the two entities have signed an agreement for Anthropic to use computing resources from xAI’s data center in Memphis, Tennessee. It’s the latest tie up in an industry that is scrambling to find enough computers to run complex AI software. SpaceX and xAI were previously separate companies, but the two merged earlier this year. The combined entity, also owned by Musk, is called SpaceXAI.

Anthropic executives made the announcement on stage at the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. SpaceXAI also put out a blog post sharing more details about the deal, which will see Anthropic draw power from xAI’s Colossus 1 supercomputer.

The partnership comes at a pivotal time for SpaceXAI, which is seeking to go public as soon as next month. A relationship with a leading AI lab could bolster SpaceX’s credibility as it pitches investors on the potential gold mine in establishing more data centers, including in space.

Notably, Space XAI said in its blog post that Anthropic has “expressed interest” in partnering to develop “orbital AI compute capacity”—essentially, data centers in space. Having Anthropic as a potential customer could help SpaceXAI boost investor confidence that there will be buyers for its super expensive supercomputing project.

Earlier this year, Musk criticized Anthropic’s AI models in a post on X, calling the company’s policies “misanthropic” and “evil,” and alleging without evidence that the AI models showed racial and sexual biases. Now, he’s significantly changed his tune, writing on X that he “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.”

Musk’s SpaceXAI first broke ground on Colossus 1 on a former Electrolux site in 2024. The company claims that it is one of the largest and fastest AI supercomputers in the world. It includes roughly 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, ranging from Nvidia’s H100 and H200 to its newer GB200 chips. The company likes to boast that it built the supercomputer in 122 days.

Emissions from gas turbines at the data center have prompted numerous complaints from local residents. Last month, environmental protesters demonstrated at a nearby SpaceX investor gathering ahead of the IPO.

Anthropic plans to use its newfound computing power to “directly improve capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers,” both companies said. The deal will give Anthropic access to more than 300 megawatts of new capacity, or approximately 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. In recent months, software developers have increasingly complained about rate limits and service disruptions to Claude Code, due to the physical limits of available computing resources.

According to Anthropic, the average developer is now spending at least 20 hours per week running Claude Code. Yesterday, The Information reported that Anthropic had committed to spend $200 billion on Google’s AI cloud services and TPU chips. Anthropic has also used Amazon’s cloud computing services and AI chips since 2023. Last month, Anthropic committed “more than $100 billion over the next ten years to [Amazon] technologies.” According to the Information report, contracts with Anthropic and OpenAI now account for “more than half of the $2 trillion in backlogs at major cloud providers” like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.