SpaceX IPO Filing Reveals Anthropic Is Paying $15 Billion a Year to Access Its Data Centers
Key takeaways
- SpaceX had rushed to build the facilities for its xAI unit, which develops the Grok AI chatbot, but Musk said his company didn’t need all of their computing capacity in the end.
- Anthropic is paying an unspecified reduced fee for May and June before the $1.25 billion per month rate takes effect, SpaceX said in its S-1 regulatory filing.
- The eye-popping figure is a sign of how hungry Anthropic is for computing resources needed to power products like its increasingly popular AI coding tools.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Photograph: Aaron P/Bauer-Griffin/Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Anthropic has agreed to pay Space X $1.25 billion per month through May of 2029 for access to cloud computing infrastructure, a long-awaited US regulatory filing revealed on Wednesday. In other words, Anthropic will be sending a rival artificial intelligence lab roughly $15 billion a year, an extraordinary sum that demonstrates how access to compute has become one of the defining bottlenecks in the race to develop advanced artificial intelligence.
Anthropic and SpaceX announced a deal earlier this month that gives the Claude developer access to GPUs at Colossus and Colossus II, a pair of data centers straddling Tennessee and Mississippi with more than one gigawatt of computing power. SpaceX had rushed to build the facilities for its xAI unit, which develops the Grok AI chatbot, but Musk said his company didn’t need all of their computing capacity in the end. Terms of the deal had not been previously disclosed.
Anthropic is paying an unspecified reduced fee for May and June before the $1.25 billion per month rate takes effect, SpaceX said in its S-1 regulatory filing.