Anthropic Signs AI Deal With SpaceX. The Partnership Could Be Headed to Space. -- Barrons.com

Dow Jones02:11

By Nate Wolf

Anthropic is turning to its competitor, Elon Musk's SpaceX, for artificial-intelligence compute capacity.

The pair announced a partnership Wednesday that will give Anthropic access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity across over 220,000 Nvidia chips at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center in Tennessee. Financial details weren't immediately available.

As part of the deal, Anthropic registered interest in collaborating with SpaceX on developing "orbital AI compute capacity." Musk and SpaceX have ambitions of operating data centers in space.

The agreement has immediate implications for users of Claude, Anthropic's flagship AI model. Citing its recent string of compute deals, the company raised usage limits for its Claude Code tool and API rate limits for the Claude Opus reasoning model.

SpaceX is an Anthropic competitor at first glance, having merged with Elon Musk's own AI lab, xAI, earlier this year. And while most observers consider xAI to be noticeably behind Anthropic and OpenAI as businesses, Musk's conglomerate can still cash in by selling capacity to its peers.

The move may also strengthen SpaceX's case for putting data centers into orbit ahead of an initial public offering, which is widely expected to happen next month.

"The compute required to train and operate the next generation of these systems is outpacing what terrestrial power, land, and cooling can deliver on the timelines that matter," xAI said in its announcement.

Anthropic could follow close behind with its own IPO later this year.

Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

 

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May 06, 2026 14:11 ET (18:11 GMT)

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