Anthropic Will Pay SpaceX $15 Billion a Year for Compute Access

Anthropic has agreed to pay SpaceX roughly $1.25 billion per month for access to Colossus, the supercomputing cluster operated by Elon Musk's xAI subsidiary, according to Axios and a recent SpaceX S-1 filing. The contract runs through May 2029 and could amount to more than $40 billion in revenue for SpaceX over its full term.

That figure nearly doubles SpaceX's current annual revenue. It is also one of the largest commercial computing contracts ever struck. The deal sits oddly with the wider industry picture, since Anthropic has positioned itself as a safety-conscious research lab and Elon Musk has spent the past two years calling that positioning a marketing exercise.

What Anthropic is buying

Colossus is a cluster of more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs based in Memphis, Tennessee, including dense deployments of H100, H200 and the newer GB200 accelerators. xAI's announcement said Anthropic will use the additional capacity to expand availability for Claude Pro and Claude Max, the company's paid subscriber tiers, which have been capacity-constrained at peak hours since launch.

The S-1 filing also mentions discussions of multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity, though no firm contract has been signed for any space-based deployment. SpaceX has been pitching the idea of putting data centres in low-Earth orbit, where solar power is uninterrupted and waste heat can radiate directly to space.

The compute arms race continues

The agreement comes a week after reports that Anthropic was raising $30 billion at a $900 billion valuation. A meaningful chunk of that round, if it closes, will go straight into infrastructure spending. TechCrunch noted that either side may exit the SpaceX agreement with 90 days' notice, leaving room for renegotiation as cheaper alternatives appear.

What stands out is the speed at which top labs are now committing tens of billions of dollars in forward compute. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have all signed multi-year cloud and chip contracts that look less like procurement and more like industrial policy. Whether the demand curve catches up with that supply curve is the only real question left.