4 min readNew DelhiUpdated: May 7, 2026 08:58 AM IST Anthropic on Wednesday, May 6, announced a deal with Elon Musk-owned SpaceX to expand computing capacity for Claude by tapping into data centres originally built to power xAI’s Grok model.
Under the agreement, SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors, will supply 300 megawatts of new capacity to Anthropic within a month.
This could help Anthropic ease capacity constraints following a surge in demand for products, such as its AI coding tool, Claude Code. While the exact terms of the deal have not been disclosed, Anthropic has said it is interested in partnering with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of compute capacity via orbital data centres in space.
The deal could be the start of a new working relationship between Anthropic’s leadership and Elon Musk, who has been critical of the Claude-maker in the past. “Frankly, I don’t think there is anything you can do to escape the inevitable irony of Anthropic ending up being misanthropic,” Musk previously wrote in a post on X.
On Wednesday, in a sharp shift from his previous remarks, Musk said that he made the decision to lease computing power after spending time with Anthropic leaders last week and that their work to ensure Anthropic’s Claude is “good for humanity” impressed him.
“No one set off my evil detector,” wrote Musk, who is currently engaged in a legal battle with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman for allegedly breaching its mission to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity.
However, Musk also warned that he would kick Anthropic or other cloud clients out of xAI’s data centres “if their AI engages in actions that harm humanity”Story continues below this ad
SpaceX as cloud provider
Anthropic is not the only AI startup that has inked a deal for computing resources with SpaceX recently. The xAI parent firm struck a similar agreement with AI coding startup Cursor a few weeks ago.
It is slightly unheard of for AI companies behind leading large language models (LLMs) to rent out their own compute capacity to rivals, considering that they are racing against each other to secure all the computing capacity they can get, which also means they are often looking for capacity from others.
One of the reasons could be that xAI does not need all the capacity it has built because its Grok model is not getting much traction. xAI got its AI data centres in Memphis up and running faster than others in the industry by relying on mobile gas turbines and Tesla Megapack batteries for power. One of these facilities has not run as consistently as more traditionally built data centres, according to a recent report by The Information.
However, Musk has clarified that xAI has moved its AI training efforts to Colossus 2. He also said that he would provide computing capacity to other AI companies that make similar efforts to favour humanity, similar to how SpaceX launches satellites for competitors with “fair terms and pricing.”Story continues below this ad
Going into business as a cloud provider for top AI companies like Anthropic could also be a good way to generate revenue for SpaceX ahead of its planned IPO. Though it is unclear how investors will take it.
Code with Claude
The Anthropic-SpaceX deal was announced on the same day as Anthropic’s first-ever developer conference held in San Francisco, California, United States.
In lieu of the extra capacity from the SpaceX deal and other similar recent agreements, Anthropic said it was doubling Claude Code’s rate limits for its paid plans, removing peak-hour usage caps for Pro and Max accounts, and sharply increasing the volume of requests developers can make to its Claude Opus models.
At the Code with Claude event, Anthropic also unveiled a new AI feature called ‘dreaming’ that is meant to help its AI systems learn by reviewing work between sessions, spotting patterns, and updating files that store user preferences and other context.