One of SpaceX’s revenue streams looks very solid: Anthropic has agreed to pay Elon Musk’s company $1.25 billion a month through May 2029.
The AI lab announced earlier this month that it would buy compute capacity from SpaceX’s Colossus data center in Tennessee to run tools for its growing customer base. SpaceX’s S-1, which came out Wednesday and outlines its plans for an initial public offering, says Anthropic will also get compute from its newer Colossus 2 data center.
Anthropic is paying a discounted rate for May and June, the document says, and either side can terminate the agreement with 90 days’ notice. If it stands, SpaceX will earn more than $40 billion from Anthropic through the term of the deal.
An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the $ 1.25 billion per month tally to Business Insider. The company’s compute chief, Tom Brown, wrote earlier in May that the Colossus compute would be used for inference—meaning how AI models draw conclusions or create outputs.
SpaceX expects to ink similar deals in the future.
“This structure allows us to monetize unused compute capacity in our infrastructure, while still permitting reallocation of the capacity for our own internal initiatives if needed in the future,” the S-1 says.
It wasn’t cheap to get enough chips to sell spare compute to Anthropic. SpaceX is burning lots of money on GPUs and cloud services, the S-1 reveals. AI losses from operations ballooned fourfold last year to more than $6 billion, driven by higher cloud costs and GPU depreciation. For the first quarter of this year, the losses more than doubled to almost $2.5 billion.
The cost of these chips is so large that the filing lists “manufacturing our own GPUs” as one of the “substantial capital expenditures” it is planning.
Producing chips would make SpaceX a competitor to Nvidia, which dominates the market for advanced GPUs.
SpaceX is in a similar bind with Google.
SpaceX uses Google Cloud through its subsidiary, Starlink. The two divisions announced a partnership in 2021, during which SpaceX installed Starlink ground stations at Google data centers.
SpaceX has also become a competitor to Google Cloud by selling hundreds of megawatts of compute to Anthropic. That’s not to mention SpaceX’s ambitious plans to build data centers in space, which Google is in talks to assist with, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The S-1 lists “AI Infrastructure” among SpaceX’s markets, estimating that, based on demand for AI compute and current GPU rental rates, the market could be worth $2.4 trillion.
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