Anthropic relies on Elon Musk for computing power.
As the company faces a surge in demand for its AI coding service, Claude Code, Anthropic plans to use SpaceX’s Colossus One data center to accommodate it. Chief Product Officer Ami Vora announced the blockbuster deal Wednesday morning at Anthropic’s developer conference in San Francisco.
Vora said Anthropic will double the current five-hour pricing limit for developers on its Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans. The company is also increasing rate limits for developers using advanced Claude Opus model APIs, increasing inputs and outputs per minute. These moves will expand the company’s already strained computing capacity.
With this challenge in mind, Anthropic turned to SpaceX. SpaceX acquired Musk’s xAI Lab in February. SpaceX’s Colossus One data center, based in Memphis, is one of the largest in the world and is equipped with tens of thousands of advanced Nvidia chips that perform the compute-intensive tasks of AI. Musk’s rapid expansion of the site and the nearby Colossus 2 data center has sparked local anger, with residents complaining of pollution from gas turbines.
Anthropic expects the deal to deliver more than 300 megawatts of computing power on more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs within the month. This builds on the company’s strategy to source chip time and capacity from hyperscaling giants, with work underway with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
The deal is another one in SpaceX’s fledgling computing sales business. Business Insider reported in April that coding startup Cursor would train its latest models on xAI’s GPUs. By signing computing deals with other companies, SpaceX and xAI can generate revenue from their infrastructure while developing AI models.
Another deal may be in the works between Anthropic and SpaceX. Deep in the press release accompanying this announcement, Anthropic writes that it has “expressed interest” in working with SpaceX to build a data center in space.
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