In an unexpected turn of events, Elon Musk's SpaceX has signed an agreement to supply computing capacity to Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot. The deal, announced Wednesday, comes as demand for Anthropic's products surges and marks a stark reversal for Musk, who had publicly lambasted the firm just months earlier.
Under the arrangement, Anthropic will gain access to all the computing power of SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center, which houses over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. The additional horsepower is intended to bolster performance for users of Anthropic's Claude Pro and Claude Max tiers, both of which have seen a sharp uptick in downloads over the past year.
SpaceX—which recently absorbed Musk's AI venture xAI and rebranded as SpaceXAI—said in a statement that the cluster delivers extreme parallel performance for large language models, multimodal systems, scientific simulation, and generative AI at frontier scale.
Anthropic also signaled ambitions beyond terrestrial computing. The company expressed interest in partnering with SpaceXAI to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity, a move that would push AI processing into space.
The collaboration caught many in the tech world off guard, given Musk's earlier broadsides against Anthropic. Just three months ago, Musk posted on X that Anthropic's AI model hates Whites, Asians, Chinese, heterosexuals, and men, calling the system misanthropic and evil. He urged the company to fix it, adding that the name Anthropic doomed it to become Misanthropic.
Explaining his about-face, Musk said Wednesday that he spent time with senior Anthropic team members to understand their safeguards. He described them as highly competent and deeply committed to doing the right thing, noting that no one set off his evil detector. So long as they engage in critical self-examination, he said, Claude will probably be good. Musk added that he was comfortable leasing Colossus 1 to Anthropic because SpaceXAI had already moved its training operations to Colossus 2.
The deal comes amid a broader reshaping of the AI landscape. The Pentagon recently secured AI contracts with seven major tech firms, notably excluding Anthropic—a decision that sparked debate over national security and ethical AI use. Meanwhile, the White House has held high-level talks with Anthropic amid disputes over defense applications and AI safety concerns.
Anthropic also announced it is increasing usage limits for certain subscribers. Changes include doubling Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for specific plans and raising API limits for Claude Opus models.
The partnership between Musk and Anthropic signals that even bitter rivalries can be set aside for access to cutting-edge compute resources—a commodity increasingly scarce in the AI arms race.
