Anthropic signed a deal with SpaceX to use all computing capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis

Anthropic will gain access to more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs at SpaceX’s Colossus One data center in Memphis under a new partnership announced on Wednesday, May 6.

The deal that injects over 300 megawatts of computing capacity into the AI firm’s network.

The agreement, revealed by Anthropic Chief Product Officer Ami Vora at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco, comes as global demand for AI compute strains existing infrastructure and forces rivals to strike unconventional alliances.

Anthropic to use all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility

Anthropic confirmed in its official announcement that it has signed on to use “all of the compute capacity” at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility. The company expects the full 300-plus megawatts and 220,000 GPUs to come online within the month.

The immediate effect for users is that Anthropic will double the five-hour rate limits on Claude Code for its Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise subscribers. It is also lifting peak-hour usage restrictions for Pro and Max accounts and raising API rate limits for Claude Opus models, according to the company’s announcement.

The SpaceX partnership adds to a compute portfolio Anthropic has been assembling at speed. The company listed several other agreements in its announcement: up to 5 gigawatts with Amazon (including nearly 1 GW of new capacity by the end of 2026), a 5 GW deal with Google and Broadcom beginning in 2027, a strategic partnership with Microsoft and Nvidia covering $30 billion of Azure capacity, and a $50 billion infrastructure investment with Fluidstack.

Taken together, these commitments represent tens of billions of dollars flowing into data center construction and chip procurement across multiple countries. For the global economy, the implications run beyond Silicon Valley. Anthropic stated it plans to expand internationally, adding inference capacity in Asia and Europe through its Amazon collaboration, targeting enterprise customers in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and government that require in-region infrastructure for compliance.

The company said it is “very intentional” about where it adds capacity, partnering with democratic nations whose legal frameworks and supply chains support large-scale investment.

SpaceX’s compute sales business takes shape

For SpaceX, the deal marks another step in monetizing the massive GPU farms it inherited when it acquired Elon Musk’s xAI lab in February. Business Insider reported in April that coding startup Cursor had also agreed to train its latest model on xAI’s GPUs. By selling access to Colossus infrastructure, SpaceX can generate revenue from hardware that would otherwise sit idle between its own AI training runs.

Musk, who as recently as February called Anthropic’s Claude model “misanthropic and evil,” struck a different tone on X following the announcement.

He wrote that he had spent time with senior Anthropic staff the previous week and came away impressed: “Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing. No one set off my evil detector.”

The deal also carries economic externalities. Colossus 1 and the nearby Colossus 2 facility in Memphis have drawn complaints from local residents over pollution from gas turbines powering the sites, Business Insider reported.

Anthropic acknowledged the energy footprint in its announcement, noting a recent commitment to cover any consumer electricity price increases caused by its US data centers and saying it is exploring ways to extend that pledge internationally.

Buried at the bottom of Anthropic’s press release was a line that may matter more in five years than it does today. The company has “expressed interest” in partnering with SpaceX to develop “multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.” No timeline, no dollar figure, no technical detail. But the sentence signals that both companies are at least exploring whether data centers in orbit could eventually supplement ground-based infrastructure.

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