Anthropic on Wednesday announced a deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at his company's Colossus 1 data center in MemphisTennessee.
As part of the agreementAnthropic will get access to more than 300 megawatts of compute capacityand it also "expressed interest" in working with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of compute capacity in space. Anthropic said the deal will directly improve capacity for its paid Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers.
The deal comes after Muskwho merged SpaceX with his competing AI startupxAIthis yearhas repeatedly criticized Anthropic because of its clash with the U.S. government. Musk has said Anthropic is "doomed to become the opposite of its name," which would be misanthropicand has asked if there's a "more hypocritical company than Anthropic."
"Anthropic hates Western Civilization," Musk wrote in February.
But on WednesdayMusk changed his tune. He said in a post on X that he spent a lot of time with senior members of the Anthropic team over the last weekand that he was "impressed."
"Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing. No one set off my evil detector," Musk wrote. "So long as they engage in critical self-examinationClaude will probably be good."
Musk spent much of the last week in federal court in OaklandCaliforniawhere he testified over the course of three days in the trial for his lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEOSam Altman.
In a separate post on X on WednesdayMusk said that xAI "will be dissolved as a separate company" and will be called SpaceXAI.
XAI has been building out its data infrastructureprimarily around Memphisas it races to compete in the booming AI market against OpenAIGoogle and Anthropic. Colossus 1 is its largest facility to date.
When building and running ColossusxAI and its subsidiaryMZX TechLLCinstalled and operated dozens of natural gas-burning turbines to power the facilityclaiming that no federal permit was required to do so because they were only for temporary use.
The turbines reportedly worsened air pollution problems around Memphisand led to persistent protests against xAI's work in the region.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of executives and researchers who defected from OpenAI. The company is best known for developing a family of AI models called Claudeand it's currently in talks with investors about raising cash at a valuation of $900 billionas CNBC previously reported.
Last monthAnthropic said that demand for Claude has led to "inevitable strain on our infrastructure," which has impacted "reliability and performance" for its usersparticularly during peak hours.
The company has been working to increase its capacity by inking several compute deals in recent weeksincluding a multibillion-dollar agreement with Amazon.
The company has also been navigating a contentious few months of negotiations with the U.S. government.
In Marchthe Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain riskblacklisting it from work with the U.S. militaryafter the two sides failed to reach an agreement on how the company's models could be used. Anthropic sued the Trump administration in San Francisco and Washington to try to reverse the Pentagon's actionsand that litigation is ongoing.
Meanwhilethe Defense Department has been embracing xAI's Grok modelalong with offerings from other AI companies.
— CNBC's Lora Kolodny contributed to this report
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