The scale of Anthropic's bet on rented computing keeps growing. Documents reviewed by Reuters put the company's agreement with SpaceX at up to $84.5 billion through 2029, nearly double the roughly $42.5 billion implied when the deal first surfaced in SpaceX's own IPO filing, where Anthropic was disclosed as paying $1.25 billion a month from May 2026 to May 2029.
The capacity sits inside SpaceX's Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centres in Memphis, Tennessee — the AI infrastructure the company absorbed when it merged with xAI in January. Colossus 2, which SpaceX has described as a computing "superfactory," is targeting more than a million GPUs online by the end of the year, most of them NVIDIA Blackwell parts. Anthropic is effectively turning a rival's idle hardware into a revenue line while it waits for its own build-out to come online.
The contract is less of a lock-in than its size suggests. Most terms allow either party to terminate on 90 days' notice, according to the filings — a flexibility that sits awkwardly beside Anthropic's other disclosures. The company has said it expects to spend at least $518 billion on computing infrastructure over a decade and has described about 80 percent of that as non-cancelable or take-or-pay.
Anthropic is not SpaceX's only large tenant. Google has separately committed to pay roughly $920 million a month from October 2026 to June 2029 for around 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs plus CPUs and memory, and a Cursor agreement appears in the filing without financial terms attached. That makes SpaceX, nominally a rocket and satellite company, one of the larger landlords of frontier-model compute.
The financials underneath the commitments stretch in both directions. Anthropic's 2025 revenue grew to about $4.6 billion, roughly twelve times the prior year, but its operating loss exceeded $8 billion, and compute and infrastructure spending reached $7.33 billion — about three times the 2024 figure and roughly 58 percent of $12.65 billion in total operating expenses. Revenue is climbing fast; the cost of the compute that produces it is climbing faster.
Read together, the two filings describe the same money from opposite ends, and neither says which bucket the SpaceX line was counted in. For anyone modelling either company, that is the open question: a commitment of this size with a three-month exit clause is a very different asset depending on whether it has been booked as a firm obligation or as an option.
The strategic takeaway is that access to compute, not model quality alone, has become the binding constraint on frontier labs — and that the companies able to rent capacity at scale, whether they build models or rockets, are pricing that scarcity accordingly.
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