Anthropic has agreed to a deal to use all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center in Tennessee.
The partnership will enable the company to gain access to more than 300 megawatts of new capacity produced by more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.
And it will result in changes, Anthropic said, that will improve the experience of using its Claude AI model for its biggest customers.
First, Anthropic doubled Claude Code’s five-hour usage window limits for Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise subscribers.
In addition, the vendor removed the peak-hour limit reduction for Claude Code on Pro and Max accounts.
And Anthropic raised API rates for Claude Opus models. These changes were detailed in a table published with a blog post about the compute deal with SpaceX.
Anthropic has been public in its need to acquire more capacity for Claude, and the SpaceX tie-up is the latest in a series of deals designed to address this, with the company acknowledging in April that “unprecedented consumer growth, in particular, has impacted reliability and performance for free, Pro, Max, and Team users.”
These deals include securing of up to 5 gigawatts from Amazon, with 1 gigawatt expected to be available by the end of the year. This followed an agreement for 5 gigawatts from Google and Broadcom, which is slated to start coming online next year.
Anthropic also forged a strategic partnership with Nvidia and Microsoft for $30 billion of Azure capacity and invested $50 billion in U.S. infrastructure with Fluidstack.
Nevertheless, the deal with SpaceX might be unusual, given that the company’s biggest shareholder, Elon Musk, said that Anthropic “hates Western civilization” following SpaceX’s dispute with the Trump administration earlier this year.
However, Musk struck a more conciliatory tone this week on his X social platform.
But the deal could also raise questions about the ability of Musk’s own xAI company, which merged with SpaceX earlier this year, to compete with Anthropic.
Anthropic, meanwhile, said it will continue to investigate opportunities to bring additional capacity online and expressed interest in partnering with SpaceX to develop space-based orbiting AI data centers.
Musk has long been an advocate of data centers in space.