Elon Musk’s SpaceX leases Colossus AI supercluster to Anthropic in major Claude compute deal

Anthropic on Wednesday announced a partnership with Elon Musk-led SpaceX to expand computing capacity for its Claude AI models, as competition intensifies among AI companies seeking access to high-performance chips and data centre capacity.

The company said it would use all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center, gaining access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity and over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs within a month.

The San Francisco-based startup also said the added compute power would allow it to raise usage limits for Claude Code and its API customers, including doubling five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans.

Anthropic Co-founder and Chief Compute Officer Tom Brown said in a post on X that the company would begin ramping up Claude inference on Colossus “in the next few days”.

“We are going to need to move a lot of atoms in order to keep up with AI demand, and there's nobody better at quickly moving atoms (on or off planet Earth),” Brown wrote, thanking SpaceX for the partnership.

Elon Musk responded on X saying he had spent time with senior members of the Anthropic team last week and was reassured by their approach to AI safety.

“Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing,” Musk wrote. “After that, I was ok leasing Colossus 1 to Anthropic, as SpaceXAI had already moved training to Colossus 2.”

Anthropic said the SpaceX agreement adds to a series of infrastructure partnerships, including an agreement with Amazon.com for up to 5 gigawatts of capacity, a 5-gigawatt deal with Google and Broadcom, and a strategic partnership with Microsoft and NVIDIA involving $30 billion in Azure capacity.

The deal comes as AI companies race to secure the vast computing infrastructure needed to train and operate increasingly advanced models.

OpenAI's rival and critic join hands

The partnership also places Musk alongside one of the leading competitors to OpenAI, a company he co-founded with Sam Altman in 2015 before leaving in 2018.

Musk has since become one of OpenAI’s most vocal critics and sued the company, Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman, accusing them of abandoning the nonprofit mission on which OpenAI was founded in favour of commercial interests.

The dispute escalated further last week, when the long-running feud between Musk and Altman moved to a federal courtroom in California for a trial expected to last about a month.

Anthropic's history itself is deeply intertwined with OpenAI.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei previously worked as a researcher at OpenAI before leaving to co-found Anthropic.

After OpenAI started running advertisements, Anthropic launched a campaign highlighting that it would not run ads on its platform.

Altman accused Anthropic of running “clearly dishonest” campaign, arguing the startup was using “doublespeak” to criticise hypothetical practices that do not exist.