One of SpaceX’s revenue sources looks very solid: Anthropic has agreed to pay Elon Musk’s company $1.25 billion a month until May 2029.
Earlier this month, AI Labs announced it would purchase computing power from SpaceX’s Colossus data center in Tennessee to run tools for its growing customer base. SpaceX’s S-1, announced Wednesday and outlining its plans for an initial public offering, says Anthropic will also acquire computing from its new Colossus 2 data center.
The documents say Anthropic will pay discounted rates in May and June and that either party can terminate the agreement with 90 days’ notice. At this rate, SpaceX could earn more than $40 billion from Anthropic over the life of the deal.
An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the $1.25 billion monthly tally to Business Insider. Tom Brown, the company’s head of computing, wrote in early May that Colossus’ computing will be used for inference, or how AI models draw conclusions or create output.
SpaceX expects to sign similar deals in the future.
“This structure allows us to monetize unused computing capacity within our infrastructure while also allowing us to reallocate capacity for internal initiatives as needed in the future,” S-1 said.
Obtaining enough chips to sell spare computing to Anthropic wasn’t cheap. S-1 reveals that SpaceX is spending a lot of money on GPUs and cloud services. Losses from AI operations quadrupled last year to more than $6 billion due to rising cloud costs and GPU depreciation. Losses more than doubled to about $2.5 billion in the first quarter of this year.
The cost of these chips is so high that the filing lists “manufacturing our own GPUs” as one of the “significant capital expenditures” it plans to make.
Once produced, SpaceX would become a competitor to Nvidia, which dominates the advanced GPU market.
SpaceX has a similar relationship with Google.
SpaceX uses Google Cloud through its subsidiary Starlink. The two divisions announced their partnership in 2021, during which SpaceX installed a Starlink ground station at Google’s data center.
SpaceX also became a competitor to Google Cloud by selling hundreds of megawatts of computing to Anthropic. The Wall Street Journal reports that SpaceX has ambitious plans to build a data center in space, and that Google is in talks to help.
S-1 lists “AI infrastructure” among SpaceX’s markets, estimating the market to be worth $2.4 trillion based on AI computing demand and current GPU rental rates.
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