Musk's SpaceX strikes data center deal with Anthropic

SAN FRANCISCO

AI startup Anthropic announced it has agreed to a major computing partnership with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, securing access to a vast data center as the Claude maker scrambles to keep pace with surging demand for its AI services.

Under the deal, Anthropic will use all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee.

The agreement gives Anthropic access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity, backed by over 220,000 Nvidia AI chips, by the end of May.

The company said the additional capacity would directly benefit subscribers to its Claude Pro and Claude Max plans.

Anthropic also announced it was immediately letting users do more with its technology.

The company said it was doubling the amount of Claude Code, eliminating restrictions that had previously cut access during busy periods, and allowing developers to make more requests to its most powerful AI models.

The SpaceX deal marks a striking partnership between two companies whose leaders have been publicly at odds.

Musk wrote in February that Anthropic “hates Western Civilization” and questioned whether there was a “more hypocritical company than Anthropic.”

But on May 6 Musk changed his tone, writing on X that he had spent time with senior Anthropic staff over the past week and was “impressed.”

“Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing,” he wrote.

SpaceX merged with xAI earlier this year in a deal valuing the two companies at $1.25 trillion. The company is widely expected to pursue an IPO this year that could be among the largest in history.

The SpaceX pact is the latest in a string of major compute agreements Anthropic has announced in recent months.

These include megadeals with Amazon, Google and Broadcom Microsoft and Nvidia, and an infrastructure investment with Fluidstack.