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Anthropic's $15 billion-a-year SpaceX compute deal can end on 90 days' notice from either side
Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for compute through May 2029 on terms either side can end with 90 days' notice. That notice period covers about $3.75 billion of the roughly $45 billion the contract is worth if it runs to term.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- The contract gives Anthropic the full 300-megawatt output of Colossus 1, a data center near Memphis with more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, owned by Musk's xAI.
- Musk, who posted in September 2025 that "Winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic," said in July he had been "clearly wrong about Anthropic."
- Anthropic's confidential IPO prospectus commits it to at least $518 billion of compute over 10 years across six partners, among them Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Broadcom and xAI.
- Google has signed its own compute deal with SpaceX, worth $920 million a month through June 2029.
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Why it matters
- constraint While all 300 megawatts of Colossus 1 go to Anthropic, xAI cannot use its own Memphis data center to train or run its own models.
- precedent The Anthropic and Google contracts together run at about $26 billion a year, above the $18 billion total revenue cited for SpaceX, so other labs can expect SpaceX to keep renting capacity to xAI's competitors.
- contradiction Cryptopolitan's headline calls this an $84.5 billion deal while its FAQ cites TechCrunch at about $40 billion, so the contract's total size is unsettled and only the monthly rate is stated consistently.
Fifteen billion dollars a year [2] for the 300 megawatts of Colossus 1 [9] works out to $50 million per megawatt-year [5]. Spread across more than 220,000 GPUs, it is at most about $68,000 per GPU a year, or near $7.80 an hour [6], if the monthly payment covers Colossus 1 alone. It may not. "We're expanding our partnership with SpaceX, and will be scaling up on (Nvidia) GB200 capacity in Colossus 2 throughout June," Tom Brown, Anthropic's co-founder and chief compute officer, wrote on X [11].
Cryptopolitan puts SpaceX's total annual revenue near $18 billion [6], and Anthropic's $15 billion is about 83% of that [3]. Anthropic ranked among SpaceX's largest customers as of July [7]. Musk said abruptly cutting off a paying customer was "not my style" [14]. As evidence, he cited Tesla's 2014 decision to stop suing over its patents and the opening of its Supercharger network to other carmakers [15].
Anthropic's prospectus sets a floor of $518 billion over 10 years [16], and some of those commitments must be paid whatever it uses [17]. Spread evenly, the floor is $51.8 billion a year [7], and the SpaceX run rate is about 29% of it [8]. Claude already trains and runs on AWS Trainium, Google TPUs and Nvidia chips [19]. The company says it will build its own infrastructure so it depends less on partners that run their own labs [18]. Meanwhile it is using the SpaceX capacity now: it doubled five-hour Claude Code limits on Pro, Max, Team and enterprise seat plans, dropped peak-hour throttling for Pro and Max, and raised API limits for Opus [20].
The exit clause can play out three ways. If Anthropic's own capacity arrives before May 2029, a quarter's notice lets it step off SpaceX hardware without paying for idle racks through the full term [3]. If its build runs late, the same clause lets the company that owns a rival lab, xAI having merged into SpaceX in February [10], end supply with 90 days' warning. The third path belongs to SpaceX: if it keeps signing labs, it can reprice Anthropic's capacity at renewal.
I think the option sits with Anthropic. A seller whose single customer pays the equivalent of about 83% of its stated revenue [3] has little reason to give notice, while Anthropic can leave once its own racks are ready [18]. The counter-case is that Anthropic has tied user limits to this capacity [20] and cannot leave until a replacement is running. Before its own build is done, the option is worth little. Cryptopolitan does not report whether leaving early costs anything beyond the notice period; if it does, this view is wrong, as it is if SpaceX can refill Colossus 1 within a quarter.
What to watch
- An updated SpaceX revenue figure showing whether the roughly $18 billion total already includes the Anthropic payments.
- A public version of Anthropic's prospectus showing how much of the $518 billion floor sits with xAI and which commitments are payable regardless of usage.
- Whether Anthropic's stated interest in multiple gigawatts of orbital compute with SpaceX becomes a signed contract running past May 2029.