By Becky Peterson
Google has agreed to rent data-center capacity from SpaceX, expanding the rocket company's artificial-intelligence business ahead of its initial public offering.
Google will pay SpaceX $920 million a month from October 2026 to June 2029 in a deal that includes the computing capacity of at least 110,000 Nvidia chips, according to a SpaceX securities filing on Friday.
The deal will ramp up over summer, and Google has the right to cancel the agreement in October if SpaceX doesn't provide the promised chips, SpaceX said. Either party can cancel the agreement starting next year with 90 days notice.
This is the second major deal SpaceX has made in recent months to rent out computing capacity to a competitor. The rocket company is expected to go public on June 12 in a public offering that values the company at $1.77 trillion.
It has pitched investors on the deal by promoting its plans to build data centers in space, a nascent technology that has gained traction as tech companies face expensive energy bills from running data centers on Earth. Meanwhile, SpaceX has had excess capacity in its Colossus data centers initially built to train its own AI model Grok.
Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, was an early investor in SpaceX. Google executive Donald Harrison sits on the SpaceX board.
The companies had previously discussed working together to send data centers to space, The Wall Street Journal reported last month. Google, which has its own cloud data-center business, has plans to launch its own orbital data centers by 2027 as part of a moonshot initiative called Project Suncatcher. It is working with another company, Planet Labs, to build those satellites.
Speaking at a JPMorgan event on Thursday, Musk said that SpaceX plans to make its future orbital data centers able to run chips from multiple companies and said it could run Google's proprietary technology.
In May, Anthropic announced plans to rent 220,000 Nvidia chips from SpaceX, before expanding the deal soon after. In the announcement, Anthropic said it was also interested in discussing using orbital data centers from SpaceX if the company successfully launches that product.
In its IPO prospectus, SpaceX said that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion a month for compute capacity in the Colossus data center built by xAI, in a deal that runs through 2029.
Write to Becky Peterson at becky.peterson@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 05, 2026 16:12 ET (20:12 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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