Anthropic, SpaceX announce compute deal that includes space development

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 Memphis, Tennessee.

As part of the agreement, Anthropic will get access to more than 300 megawatts of compute capacity, and 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 Musk, who merged SpaceX with his competing AI startup, xAI, this year, has 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 misanthropic, and has asked if there's a "more hypocritical company than Anthropic."

"Anthropic hates Western Civilization," Musk wrote in February.

But on Wednesday, Musk 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 week, and 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-examination, Claude will probably be good."

Musk spent much of the last week in federal court in Oakland, California, where he testified over the course of three days in the trial for his lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman.

In a separate post on X on Wednesday, Musk said that xAI "will be dissolved as a separate company" and will be called SpaceXAI.

XAI has been building out its data infrastructure, primarily around Memphis, as it races to compete in the booming AI market against OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Colossus 1 is its largest facility to date.

When building and running Colossus, xAI and its subsidiary, MZX Tech, LLC, installed and operated dozens of natural gas-burning turbines to power the facility, claiming that no federal permit was required to do so because they were only for temporary use.

The turbines reportedly worsened air pollution problems around Memphis, and 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 Claude, and it's currently in talks with investors about raising cash at a valuation of $900 billion, as CNBC previously reported.

Last month, Anthropic said that demand for Claude has led to "inevitable strain on our infrastructure," which has impacted "reliability and performance" for its users, particularly during peak hours.

The company has been working to increase its capacity by inking several compute deals in recent weeks, including a multibillion-dollar agreement with Amazon.

The company has also been navigating a contentious few months of negotiations with the U.S. government.

In March, the Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, blacklisting it from work with the U.S. military, after 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 actions, and that litigation is ongoing.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department has been embracing xAI's Grok model, along with offerings from other AI companies.

— CNBC's Lora Kolodny contributed to this report

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