Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month

Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for compute capacity from SpaceX’s Colossus data centers in Tennessee, including Colossus and Colossus 2. The agreement includes discounted rates for May and June and allows either party to terminate with 90 days’ notice. If the deal continues, SpaceX expects to earn more than $40 billion over the term. SpaceX plans to use Colossus compute for inference, enabling AI models to generate outputs. SpaceX expects additional similar deals. The company is also investing heavily in GPUs and cloud services, with operating losses rising sharply due to cloud costs and GPU depreciation, and it lists manufacturing its own GPUs as a major capital expenditure.

"Anthropic has agreed to pay Elon Musk's company $1.25 billion a month through May 2029. The AI lab announced earlier this month that it would buy compute capacity from SpaceX's Colossus data center in Tennessee to run tools for its growing customer base. SpaceX's S-1, which came out Wednesday and outlines its plans for an initial public offering, says Anthropic will also get compute from its newer Colossus 2 data center."

"Anthropic is paying a discounted rate for May and June, the document says, and either side can terminate the agreement with 90 days' notice. If it stands, SpaceX will earn more than $40 billion from Anthropic through the term of the deal. An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the $ 1.25 billion per month tally to Business Insider. The company's compute chief, Tom Brown, wrote earlier in May that the Colossus compute would be used for inferencemeaning how AI models draw conclusions or create outputs."

""This structure allows us to monetize unused compute capacity in our infrastructure, while still permitting reallocation of the capacity for our own internal initiatives if needed in the future," the S-1 says. It wasn't cheap to get enough chips to sell spare compute to Anthropic. SpaceX is burning lots of money on GPUs and cloud services, the S-1 reveals. AI losses from operations ballooned fourfold last year to more than $6 billion, driven by higher cloud costs and GPU depreciation."

"For the first quarter of this year, the losses more than doubled to almost $2.5 billion. The cost of these chips is so large that the filing lists "manufacturing our own GPUs" as one of the "substantial capital expenditures" it is planning. Producing chips would make SpaceX a competitor to Nvidia, which dominates the market for advanced GPUs. SpaceX is in a similar bind with Google."

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