Anthropic pens unexpected deal with Musk’s xAI to use their "Colossus” Data Center

In a surprising alliance between two of the industry's most influential players, Anthropic and SpaceX have signed a landmark agreement giving the AI lab access to Colossus 1, currently one of the world's most powerful AI supercomputers.

Editorial credit: gguy / Shutterstock

The deal, announced last week, marks a pragmatic shift in the AI landscape. Despite a history of public tension between Elon Musk and Anthropic leadership, the partnership provides Anthropic with the massive computing power needed to scale its Claude models, while positioning SpaceX as a premier infrastructure provider ahead of its highly anticipated IPO.

Unlocking "Colossus" for Claude

Located in Memphis, Tennessee, the Colossus 1 facility is an engineering marvel. Under the new agreement, Anthropic gains access to over 300 megawatts of power linked to more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including the latest H200 and GB200 Blackwell accelerators.

Immediate impact for users:

Increased capacity: Anthropic has already doubled the five-hour usage limits for Claude Code across its Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise tiers.

Lifting restrictions: The deal has allowed Anthropic to remove peak-hour limit reductions and "considerably" raise API rate limits for its flagship Claude Opus models.

Performance gains: Access to the cluster enables more efficient training and inference, directly translating to faster response times for complex coding and reasoning tasks.

The next frontier: Data centers in space

The collaboration goes beyond terrestrial hardware. Both companies have expressed a shared interest in developing "orbital AI compute capacity" measured in multiple gigawatts.

SpaceX, now operating its AI division under the SpaceXAI banner after a recent merger with xAI, argued that the energy and cooling demands of next-generation AI are outstripping Earth's resources. The vision involves launching massive, satellite-based data centers that can harness near-constant solar energy and benefit from the natural cold of space to cool high-performance GPUs.

A pragmatic pivot in the Musk-Altman rivalry

The deal is particularly notable given Elon Musk’s ongoing legal battle with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. By providing Anthropic, OpenAI’s primary rival, with a massive compute advantage, Musk is effectively "tilting the scales" of the AI race.

Musk noted on X that after spending time with the Anthropic team, he was impressed by their commitment to safety, stating, "No one set off my evil detector." He confirmed that SpaceX was able to lease Colossus 1 to Anthropic because SpaceXAI had already migrated its own training workloads to the even larger Colossus 2 cluster.

Strengthening the infrastructure web

The SpaceX deal is the latest in a string of massive infrastructure "insurance policies" secured by Anthropic this year, including:

• Amazon: A 5GW partnership (1GW expected by late 2026)

• Google & Broadcom: A 5GW deal set for 2027

• Microsoft & NVIDIA: $30 billion in Azure compute capacity

As the "compute wars" intensify, Anthropic’s strategy of diversifying its infrastructure across every major provider ensures it remains immune to the supply bottlenecks currently hampering its competitors.