SpaceX IPO Filing Reveals Anthropic Is Paying $15 Billion a Year to Access Its Data Centers

Key points

• Anthropic has agreed to pay SpaceX $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.