"in May 2026, we entered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI research and development public benefit corporation, with respect to access to compute capacity across COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II. Pursuant to these agreements, the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee"
Anthropic is paying them 1.25 billion per month to serve Claude in their data centers. That's more revenue than Starlink. In fact that's their largest revenue stream lol.
It’s also interesting that Cursor (that spacex is acquiring ) also just announced yesterday they are training in colossus.
So who’s using it? Is spacex just renting out parts of their data center? Or is cursor done done?
> COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177
It may be sick, but someone's got a sense of humor over there :)
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
As far as I can Google the colossus data centers did cost about 7-10 and 18 B respectively.
Renting them out in part at 1.25 B pr month sounds like a very good deal for spacex.
It's really not.
can you elaborate?
Napkin math on 5 year depreciation is 5.5 billion per year for 28 billion. However the 28 billion is cash upfront, spacex is probably paying 10-20% interest on the 28 billion for another 2-6 billion per year.
So net you are looking at finance expenses of 7-11 billion per year. The electricity costs will be significant on top of that, but harder to get a solid read on.
Net of everything, spacex may be getting a 14-28 percent yield before paying for electricity. After electricity/insurance/data/taxes/other expenses - I’d guess it’s anywhere between 0% and 7% yield.
Odds are good that Anthropic abandons the deal before the depreciation schedule completes. Who is going to rent the GPUs then?
At the time of the announcement IIRC the deal was only for Colossus 1. Is Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 new?
At the time the consensus narrative was that SpaceX no longer needed Colossus 1 for Grok and that was why it could be leased to Anthropic while Colossus 2 would handle Grok training and inference. Does Anthropic also leasing Colossus 2 change this?
They are. This is from their "Chief Compute Officer".
https://x.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375
Right. This compute still being powered by an illegal amount of gas turbines in a residential neighborhood?
Claude is eating so much compute, the threat of that power being tuned down by lawsuit (rightfully) is worth the risk to Anthropic in the short-term. Instead of declaring "bubble", I'm just going to say that's so crazy.
Or SpaceX is absorbing the risk should that power be turned off... still morally shitty but not obviously economically so.
Colossus 1 is in an industrial area, next door to a grid scale natural gas power plant. One that's fully operational.
Then why do they keep getting sued, then going one state over and running the same playbook that got them sued in the previous state?
https://naacp.org/articles/naacp-sues-xai-illegal-pollution-...
Because they have two compute clusters? Colossus 1 and Colossus 2?
If your impression was that they went "we're done here", packed up and left, you're wrong. They're both operating and expanding their operations. And fighting environmental activists in court while at it.
Which I respect them for. "Environmental activists" are scum of the earth, as a rule, and "pay some activists to sue your competition" is a true time-honored classic of grey area legal warfare. SpaceX had to deal with that long before they merged with xAI - pretty much every time they built or expanded infrastructure.
Anyone can sue anyone for anything, and only the truly asinine lawsuits get thrown out pre-emptively, so "getting sued by environmental activists" is a more reliable indicator of "they're building something" and "they're stepping on some bigwig's toes" than it is of any "environmental damage". Tactics like this are a part of why US is a lousy place to build infrastructure in.
Yes and both are getting sued? I wouldn't necessarily classify the NAACP as environmental activists, but they are concerned with the wellbeing of the people they represent.
has anyone done the math on: 1. cost to build out and run the data centers 2. cost of compute (hardware and energy) 3. depreciation of legacy GPU and thus value at the end of 3 years.
And then compare the $45B revenue from Anthropic to see if it's mostly break even or if one of Anthropic/SpaceX came out ahead on the contract.
SpaceX is already indicating their strategy on this, because they’re renting their last-gen data center to Anthropic and keeping the current-gen data center for themselves. Rinse and repeat.
It's same gen.
Maybe it is a win/win. Anthropic gets desperately needed compute at a fair price. SpaceXAI sells compute at a fair price and gets desperately needed revenues.
Well Colossus 1 has 230k GPUs, including 30k GB200s and Colossus 2 has 550k GB200s & GB300s.
So my guess on costs would be like ~$10B for Colossus 1, and Colossus 2 would be like ~20b.
a GB300 rack is like 5-6 million so seems a bit low.
Yeah, maybe these aren't good guesses. I was basing it off CapEx and Elon's tweet about them. Maybe C2 isn't completely filled yet.
It has $25 billion on AI cap expenditure in the S1. So generally looks like a solid deal for SpaceX.
[dead]
The whole AI world really is completely circular spending where every one loses money along the way. The only one really making any money is Nvidia.
How is SpaceX not making money?
Total investment is 20-40B, rent to Anthropic for 45B over 3 years.
Anthropic is also profitable now.
Anthropic is not profitable and does not expect to be revenue even until 2028. They are just losing less billions per year than everyone else.
As always, free cash flow and unit economics are more interesting than net profit.
By which metrics Anthropic is making a lot of money.
Except that they're loaning a bunch of money to their "customers" to "buy" their products. It's still really circular.
This thing is going to explode. From this I have to imagine OpenAIs numbers are also going to be much worse than people imagine / what has been shared.
Wow! 3 years is an eternity at this level.
Anthropic can cancel the deal on short notice: “The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.”
Sure, either side could cancel. But Anthropic needs compute, and they found it in SpaceXAI. Why would they cancel the deal unless they don't need more compute or if they could get compute for less elsewhere (but where would that be realistically)?
Whoa. I've said before, but I think Dario severely underestimated the coming demand and ensuing need for compute, and would need to pay through the nose when the crunch hit. I suspect that Google deal also worked out better for Google. This data point supports that view.
While Altman got laughed out of the room as a "podcasting bro" asking for trillions in investment in compute, Dario was going on about how difficult it is to forecast capacity on the Dwarkesh podcast. Seems like a major unforced error on Dario's part. What I cannot understand is how they both came to such different perspectives; my best guess is that ChatGPT has so much more traffic that OpenAI could gauge the trends much better.
This won't hurt Anthropic long-term of course, but this won't look great on that balance sheet, that too right around the time they plan to IPO.
They have different personalities. I can only imagine Altman wants to stay on top of the chaos, and believes he will come out ahead whatever happens, while Dario is trying to stay realistic and mitigate worst-case scenarios.
Being drowned in demand and scrambling for compute because you’re more successful than anticipated is a better problem than the other way around.
Lmao wtf. Based on this post I can clearly see you've never properly understood what balance sheets are and how they are created.
Stop posting stuff you have ZERO clue about.
$45 billion for a 3 year rental.
What would be interesting to know how much did it cost xAI to build it ? Ai says between $18-$40 billion to just build, without running cost, but no idea how close to reality this is.
The AI row of the capex table in the S-1 should be a pretty close approximation.
Nobody pays MSRP at that scale
Given global demand and that they were late to the order party, they probably paid more lol
Closer to 18b than 40. Running costs are 1-2b a year.
More like $25 billion since 2025, with $7 billion of spending in the past 3 months. Look at page 22 of the filing.
Anthropic is getting capacity from Colossus 1 not Colossus 2 it sounded like. The initial colossus capex was under $5B, making that an even more astounding payoff.
Edit: S1 states both are being leased so the 20-25B initial investment probably more relevant
The S-1 states that it gets capacity from both Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.
... and a sign Anthropic couldn't find enough compute anywhere else, so they had to bite the bullet. Interesting.
how much did SpaceX / xAI pay for these GPUs? After 3 years they'll probably be mostly deprecated.
Are GPUs from 3 years ago being deprecated today?
And how many of them were diverted from Tesla?
Pretty sure that Tesla didn't use Colossus. Tesla used Cortex 1 and Cortex 2 which are at the Gigafactory in Austin.
Tesla famously never got to use them https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/06/elon-musk-is-diverting-...
Everyone laughed at Allbirds getting into the business of selling compute.
The reason people laugh at Allbirds is that they don't have the money or expertise to build a competitive offering.
They certainly have some big shoes to fill. But I'm glad they didn't die with their boots on, and got their foot in the door at this new opportunity. It certainly didn't help that they were running on a shoestring budget.
And when Anthropic runs Claude on Allbirds' GPUs they'll give it a SOLE.md.
I see what you did there.