Elon Musk has clarified that the widely discussed AI infrastructure arrangement between SpaceX and Anthropic is not a guaranteed multi-year mega-contract, but instead an initial six-month leasing agreement centered around the Colossus AI supercomputer network in Memphis, Tennessee. The clarification came after SpaceX IPO-related filings suggested Anthropic could pay about $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for access to Colossus and Colossus II, suggesting a deal potentially worth close to $45 billion over three years. But now, Musk said those assumptions overstated the certainty of the arrangement, explaining that SpaceX had only agreed to a 180-day lease structure with flexibility built into the contract.
According to Musk, the short duration was requested by SpaceX itself because the company wants the ability to reclaim compute capacity if internal demand rises sharply. The agreement reportedly allows either party to terminate with 90 days’ notice after the initial period. Musk stated that SpaceX would provide Anthropic with a ‘reasonable off-ramp’ if the arrangement ends, but added that the company may eventually need the infrastructure back if AI compute becomes critically low.
The infrastructure involved is huge by global AI standards. Anthropic is gaining access to Colossus 1, currently regarded as one of the world’s largest AI supercomputers. Built by xAI in Memphis, the system was initially powered by 100,000 Nvidia GPUs and assembled in around 122 days, an unusually fast deployment timeline for hyperscale AI infrastructure. Within months, the cluster expanded to around 200,000 GPUs, and newer estimates linked to the Anthropic agreement place the figure above 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. Reports also indicate Anthropic will receive access to more than 300 megawatts of compute capacity, while xAI shifts some of its own training workloads toward the newer Colossus 2 facility.
For SpaceX and xAI, the deal is also financially significant. SpaceX’s AI division reportedly generated about $818 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2026 but simultaneously posted operating losses near $2.5 billion as spending on GPUs, semiconductors, data centers, and energy systems accelerated. xAI itself reportedly lost more than $6 billion during 2025 while aggressively expanding Colossus infrastructure. Leasing spare compute capacity to outside firms like Anthropic provides a way to monetize underused infrastructure while Grok and other Musk AI systems continue scaling.
At the same time, for Anthropic, this deal becomes critical as its Claude platform has reportedly experienced explosive usage growth, with some industry estimates suggesting nearly 80x expansion over the past year. Existing infrastructure agreements with Amazon and Google reportedly could not come online quickly enough to match demand. After securing the Colossus deal, Anthropic immediately raised Claude Code throughput limits across multiple service tiers, with token processing limits increasing several-fold for developers and enterprise customers.
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Ashutosh is a Senior Writer at The Tech Portal, largely reporting on new tech, and intersection of technology and business. Ashutosh’s career spans across nearly a decade of technology writing across multiple platforms and languages.
