SpaceX backs Anthropic with data centre deal amidst Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit

Anthropic has reached a deal to tap the computing resources of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, marking a detente with its one-time critic and a boost for both companies in the high-stakes artificial intelligence race.

Under the agreement announced on Wednesday, Anthropic will use the full computing power of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors and will give the Claude chatbot maker 300 megawatts of new capacity within a month. That’s enough electricity to power more than 300,000 homes – as the Dario Amodei-led company seeks to boost the capacity of its Claude Pro and Claude Max AI assistants for subscribers.

The announcement comes as Anthropic held its developer day and unveiled a new feature for its Claude AI system called “dreaming”. The tool allows AI systems to review work between sessions, spot patterns, and update files that store user preferences and other context.

Available as a research preview, “dreaming” comes with software for managing agents, or AI programmes that perform tasks with little human involvement. Amodei has previously warned that AI could wipe out 50 percent of entry-level jobs in the next one to five years.

Buoyed by the extra capacity from the SpaceX deal and other similar recent agreements, Anthropic said it was doubling Claude Code’s rate limits for its paid plans, removing peak-hour usage caps for Pro and Max accounts, and sharply increasing the volume of requests developers can make to its Claude Opus models.

The company said it is also interested in working with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of space-based orbital data centres – one of Musk’s key goals and a major driver behind SpaceX’s initial public offering – as the endeavour is expected to be highly capital-intensive and technically challenging.

In a statement on X, Musk said he made the decision to lease computing power to Anthropic after spending time with its leaders last week. Their work to ensure Anthropic’s Claude AI is “good for humanity” impressed him, he said.

“No one set off my evil detector,” wrote Musk, who is battling OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman in court for allegedly breaching its mission to develop AI for the good of humanity and remain a nonprofit organisation.

OpenAI strain

Last week Musk alleged in court that by late 2022, Altman was trying to “steal the charity” and claimed that “it turned out to be true”.

Musk, who cofounded OpenAI, also claimed that OpenAI wouldn’t have existed without him. The world’s richest man said that he founded OpenAI following a conversation with Google cofounder Larry Page, which he felt lacked concern about AI safety.

“I said, ‘What if AI wipes out all humans?’ He said that would be fine so long as artificial intelligence survives. I said that was insane, that’s just crazy. And then he called me a ‘speciesist’ because I care about humans more than AI. … The reason OpenAI exists is because Larry Page called me a ‘speciesist.’ … What would be the opposite of Google? An open-source nonprofit.”

OpenAI’s lawyers claimed that Musk’s lawsuit was an attempt to undermine the Altman-led company in favour of his own xAI, now part of SpaceX.

Musk’s deal comes as the administration of United States President Donald Trump pens new agreements with other AI giants, excluding Anthropic.

On Tuesday, tech giants Microsoft, Google and Elon Musk’s xAI agreed to allow the federal government access to test their new artificial intelligence tools amid hacking concerns surrounding Anthropic’s technology.

Last week, the Department of Defense also announced a deal with 10 different AI giants to use their tech on classified networks. Anthropic was not part of that deal.