Musk Clarifies: SpaceX's Computing Rental to Anthropic is Only a Six-Month Short Contract

Musk clarified on social media on Thursday that the computational power rental agreement between SpaceX and Anthropic is only a short-term contract of 180 days, rather than the multi-year contract the market previously understood.

"SpaceX did not commit to renting out the Colossus for many years, although this situation could indeed happen," Musk added. He also mentioned that the short-term lease was SpaceX's own request, not something imposed by Anthropic. He stated that a reasonable exit plan would be provided to Anthropic, but if computing resources become extremely scarce, SpaceX reserves the right to reclaim early.

According to previous reports, Anthropic signed an agreement with SpaceX AI (i.e., the name change for xAI after its acquisition by SpaceX). Under the agreement, starting from the signing date to May 2029, it would pay 12.5 billion dollars per month to the other party to use the 300-megawatt computing power of the Colossus and Colossus II data center clusters located in Memphis, Tennessee. The agreement is expected to bring in more than 400 billion dollars in revenue for SpaceX. SpaceX disclosed last week in its IPO regulatory filings that both parties could terminate the agreement with a 90-day notice, but the document did not mention a six-month deadline.

This deal reflects Anthropic's urgent demand for computing power. In addition to collaborating with SpaceX, Anthropic had previously committed to paying approximately 200 billion dollars to Google Cloud over the next five years for training and deploying Claude; last month, it also reached a new agreement with Google and Broadcom to lock in about 3.5 GW of TPU computing power resources, which are expected to be launched gradually from 2027 onwards.

On SpaceX's side, its AI business department achieved revenue of 818 million dollars in the quarter ending March this year, but had an operating loss of about 2.5 billion dollars. Renting out computing power externally is an attempt for SpaceX to extend its role as a "computing power service provider" and also helps to spread the high costs of data center construction and operation. Musk said last week that he was negotiating similar services with other companies, and revealed that with the advancement of on-orbit data center construction, SpaceX will have a larger scale of AI computing power supply capabilities in the future.