Anthropic has agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May of 2029 for access to cloud computing infrastructure, a long-awaited US regulatory filing revealed on Wednesday. In other words, Anthropic will be sending a rival artificial intelligence lab roughly $15 billion a year, an extraordinary sum that demonstrates how access to compute has become one of the defining bottlenecks in the race to develop advanced artificial intelligence.
Anthropic and SpaceX announced a deal earlier this month that gives the Claude developer access to GPUs at Colossus and Colossus II, a pair of data centers straddling Tennessee and Mississippi with more than one gigawatt of computing power. SpaceX had rushed to build the facilities for its xAI unit, which develops the Grok AI chatbot, but Musk said his company didn’t need all of their computing capacity in the end. Terms of the deal had not been previously disclosed.
Anthropic is paying an unspecified reduced fee for May and June before the $1.25 billion per month rate takes effect, SpaceX said in its S-1 regulatory filing.
The eye-popping figure is a sign of how hungry Anthropic is for computing resources needed to power products like its increasingly popular AI coding tools. The company’s revenue for the second quarter of 2026 is expected to exceed $10 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the figures to WIRED. SpaceX did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment. In a post on X about the deal, Musk said that SpaceX was “in discussions with other companies to do the same.”
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SpaceX says it expects to “enter into additional similar services contracts” for its compute infrastructure and will continue using its data centers for itself. “We have sufficient capacity to provide compute for our own AI models, including support of our training and inference demands, and to satisfy the obligations under these agreements,” the filing states. “We believe our dual monetization strategy provides multiple pathways to generate returns on invested capital.”
The filing details SpaceX’s business opportunities and risks ahead of an initial public offering. SpaceX is pursuing the largest IPO in history, with hopes of raising about $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion. The company filed its initial paperwork confidentially with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on April 1, allowing time to make edits based on feedback from the regulator. The filing released on Wednesday is the cleaned-up version, though additional changes could come before it debuts on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker SPCX, which could reportedly come as soon as June 12.
SpaceX, including X and xAI, generated nearly $4.7 billion in revenue and lost almost $4.3 billion in the first quarter of this year, according to the filing. Last year, SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue but lost $4.9 billion after heavy spending to develop AI technologies and a bigger rocket, according to the filing.
The S-1 is meant to help potential investors better understand the company and the challenges it faces. One widespread concern is the amount of power Musk holds over SpaceX and whether there are enough safeguards to hold the cofounder and CEO in check.
Excerpts of the IPO filing seen by Reuters before it was published showed that the only person who can fire Musk is the billionaire himself. The documents also revealed that he will be able to maintain control of the company’s board. In addition, he and his allies will have outsized voting power, allowing them to beat back attempts by activist shareholders to derail company endeavors. SpaceX also plans to exercise provisions of Texas law to fend off hostile takeovers and the removal of executives or board members.
In recent weeks, advocacy groups including a leading US teachers’ union, AI safety researchers, and environmental organizations operating near SpaceX facilities have called on investors to think twice before buying shares in the company. The activists have written to investors and SpaceX urging them to reconsider support for an approach that consolidates power with Musk. The heads of public employee retirement funds for California, New York, and New York City jointly called SpaceX’s proposal “novel and extreme” and the “the most management-favorable governance structure ever brought to the U.S. public markets at this scale.”
“We acknowledge SpaceX’s extraordinary technical and commercial achievements, and we recognize the role the company plays in U.S. national security and commercial space,” the pension fund leaders wrote to Musk and his fellow executives. “Its governance must at least adhere to the baseline protections upon which long-term institutional capital depends, rather than seeking to diminish them.”
They and other activists are also concerned about SpaceX’s reported intentions to let individual investors buy an unusually large slice, about 30 percent, of initially offered shares, which could turn the company into a risky meme stock with wildly fluctuating prices. However, unless there are major hiccups with the IPO, SpaceX will quickly benefit from new stock market rules that will require certain popular investment funds to buy up its shares and hold onto them, potentially both boosting and stabilizing prices.
Leaks from confidential versions of the S-1 are rare, but SpaceX has experienced a bunch of them beyond the governance details. Reporting from The Information revealed sales from Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, reached about $11.4 billion last year. The outlet also highlighted SpaceX’s growing debt load—up to $23 billion last year. Reuters recently reported SpaceX has spent more than $15 billion trying to develop Starship, a larger rocket than the company’s commercially successful workhorse, Falcon 9. The latest launch attempt aimed at proving out Starship is scheduled for Thursday.
Other leaks described xAI potentially being banned in certain countries for its chatbot generating sexually abusive imagery, plans to spend a substantial amount of money manufacturing GPUs, and uncertainty about orbiting data centers in space working out as a business.
Update 5/20/26 7:32pm ET: This story has been updated with details from Elon Musk's X post about the Anthropic partnership.
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