What was announced on May 6
Anthropic said it had reached an agreement to use all of the compute capacity at Colossus 1, a data center near Memphis, Tennessee: more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and over 300 megawatts, available within the month. The same post doubled Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans, removed a peak-hours limit reduction for Pro and Max accounts, and raised API rate limits for Claude Opus models, all effective the same day. [1]
Anthropic listed the deal alongside several other compute commitments announced the same day: up to 5 gigawatts from Amazon, 5 gigawatts from Google and Broadcom starting in 2027, $30 billion of Azure capacity with Microsoft and Nvidia, and a $50 billion infrastructure investment from Fluidstack. Colossus 1 was the one already available; the rest is capacity coming online later. [1]
A cluster built to train Grok, now controlled by SpaceX
Colossus 1 is xAI's original Memphis supercomputer, built to train Grok. The counterparty to this deal is not xAI directly but SpaceXAI, the branding xAI's press release used after SpaceX acquired xAI three months earlier. SpaceXAI's own announcement called Colossus 1 "one of the world's largest and fastest-deployed AI supercomputers" and described the deal as the first step toward a much larger ambition: multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute, citing SpaceX's launch cadence and constellation experience. [2]
Atlas interpretation: That framing explains an oddity in how the deal reads. Anthropic is renting a cluster that xAI built and that SpaceX now owns through its February acquisition, described in a press release under a merged SpaceXAI byline rather than either company's name alone. The orbital-compute pitch in that release is aspirational; nothing in either company's May 6 announcement describes hardware in orbit or a funded plan to put it there. [2]
The price, from a filing neither party volunteered
Neither the Anthropic nor the SpaceXAI announcement disclosed a price. TechCrunch reported on May 20 that Anthropic agreed to pay xAI $1.25 billion a month, at a discounted rate for the first two months of ramp-up, through May 2029, with either side able to terminate on 90 days' notice. The total value could exceed $40 billion over the contract term. The figures came from SpaceX's own S-1 filing rather than from either company's statement, and the filing described the arrangement as part of a "dual monetization strategy" with more such contracts expected. [3]
Atlas interpretation: The payment flowing to xAI rather than to SpaceX, while SpaceX is the entity that disclosed it, is consistent with the acquisition leaving xAI as the operating subsidiary that holds the Colossus 1 contract and collects the revenue, with SpaceX reporting the arrangement upward because it now owns xAI. A monthly figure attached to a securities filing is a stronger number than a vendor's own announcement, since it is the kind of disclosure that carries legal exposure if wrong. [3]
Sources
- Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX
Anthropic · May 6, 2026
- New Compute Partnership with Anthropic
SpaceXAI · May 6, 2026
- Anthropic will pay xAI $1.25B per month for compute
TechCrunch · May 20, 2026