According to reports from The Economic Times, Anthropic announced a partnership with Elon Musk-led SpaceX to expand computing capacity for its Claude AI models. The San Francisco-based startup will utilize all compute capacity at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center, gaining access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity and over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs within a month. As reported by The Economic Times, the company said the added compute power would allow it to raise usage limits for Claude Code and its API customers, including doubling five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans. The Colossus 1 supercomputer features over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs in the form of H100s, H200s, and the latest GB200s "Blackwell" processors, offering "unprecedented scale for AI training, fine-tuning, and high-performance computing workloads."
According to The Economic Times, Anthropic Co-founder and Chief Compute Officer Tom Brown said the company would begin ramping up Claude inference on Colossus "in the next few days." Brown stated that the company would need to move a lot of atoms in order to keep up with AI demand, and there's nobody better at quickly moving atoms (on or off planet Earth). Brown thanked SpaceX for the partnership on social media platform X. The partnership comes as Anthropic is reportedly "starving for more compute for its AI requirements" and is expanding its capabilities at a scale like none other, while reportedly making in-house chips and working with some big chipmakers.
As reported by The Economic Times, Elon Musk responded on X saying he had spent time with senior members of the Anthropic team last week and was reassured by their approach to AI safety. "Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing," Musk wrote. "After that, I was ok leasing Colossus 1 to Anthropic, as SpaceXAI had already moved training to Colossus 2." According to The Economic Times, this represents a significant development as Musk has become one of OpenAI's most vocal critics and sued the company, Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman, accusing them of abandoning the nonprofit mission.
According to The Economic Times, the SpaceX agreement adds to a series of infrastructure partnerships for Anthropic, including an agreement with Amazon.com for up to 5 gigawatts of capacity, a 5-gigawatt deal with Google and Broadcom, and a strategic partnership with Microsoft and NVIDIA involving $30 billion in Azure capacity. The partnership places Musk alongside one of the leading competitors to OpenAI, as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei previously worked as a researcher at OpenAI before leaving to co-found Anthropic. Anthropic has also announced a partnership with Amazon for 6GW Trainium chip capacity for its Claude AI models, among several other partnerships.
According to recent reports, Anthropic has expressed interest in partnering with SpaceX to deploy multi-Gigawatts of compute capacity in orbit. SpaceX believes that an orbital compute installation will address major bottlenecks of terrestrial-based systems such as power, land, and cooling. SpaceX is the only organization with the launch cadence, mass-to-orbit economics, and constellation operations experience to make orbital compute a near-term engineering program rather than a research concept. If engineering challenges can be overcome, space-based compute offers near-limitless sustainable power with less impact on Earth. The only question remains, how soon are we going to see it in action.
