Anthropic Leases Colossus 1 AND 2 from xAI: $1.25B/Month and What Google Just Copied

Since May 2026, Anthropic has been paying $1.25 billion per month to xAI, Elon Musk's AI division folded into SpaceX in early 2026, for access to the Colossus 1 and 2 clusters (220,000+ GPUs, 300 megawatts). The deal is structured as a renewable 180-day lease with 90-day notice, potentially worth ~$45 billion if the contract runs its full course through May 2029. In June 2026, Google signed a similar agreement at $920 million per month. Together, these two deals confirm that the AI war is now fought over megawatts, not algorithms.

On May 6, 2026, Anthropic signed a deal nobody saw coming: leasing the entirety of xAI's Colossus 1 datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee, with 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs and 300 megawatts of capacity, at $1.25 billion per month, structured as an initial 180-day lease with a mutual 90-day termination option, potentially totaling ~$45 billion over the full term according to SpaceX's S-1 prospectus (May 2026) if the contract runs through May 2029, far from the initial "~$4 billion" figure reported by Fortune before the exact terms were disclosed. In June 2026, Tom Brown, co-founder and chief compute officer at Anthropic, confirmed on X that the company is expanding its access to Colossus 2's GB200s. The same Elon Musk who wrote on February 27, 2026 that Anthropic "hates Western civilization" is now leasing his infrastructure to Grok's direct competitor, through xAI, his AI division since the SpaceX-xAI merger in early 2026. This reversal is not a billionaire's whim. It is a symptom of a crisis most executives are underestimating.

I train SMBs on Claude Code every day. For months, my clients' number-one frustration hasn't been the model: it's been availability. Rate limits hit during crunch time, degraded service at peak hours, AI agents running at a crawl. This SpaceX deal is not a tech footnote: it is proof that the AI bottleneck has fundamentally changed.

Why Anthropic had no choice

Anthropic had no other option available in the short term: its growth is exploding, all its infrastructure agreements deliver in late 2026 or 2027, and Colossus 1 was the only large datacenter operational and available immediately. This deal is a survival bridge, not a strategic choice.

How did 80x growth bring the system to its knees?

Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, revealed a number that explains everything: according to CNBC on May 6, 2026, Claude's usage grew 80-fold on an annualized basis in Q1 2026. Annualized revenue went from $87 million in January 2024 to $30 billion in April 2026. The company had planned for 10x growth. It got eight times that.

This is not a marketing projection. According to CNBC, Anthropic is currently negotiating a funding round at a $900 billion valuation. That number would not exist without a product whose demand massively outstrips supply.

The problem is that unlike Google or Meta, Anthropic is the least vertically integrated frontier lab. No custom chips, no proprietary datacenters (until recently), no energy grid. Anthropic designs models and runs them on other people's infrastructure: Google Cloud, AWS, Azure. When demand surges, you depend on your providers' capacity.

The average developer now spends over 20 hours per week on Claude Code, according to Wired. These are no longer occasional queries to a chatbot. These are agents running for hours, consuming compute continuously. Yesterday's architecture can no longer hold.

What deals has Anthropic already signed?

The SpaceX partnership didn't come out of nowhere. It is the missing piece of a massive puzzle:

Every other deal delivers in late 2026 or 2027. Only Colossus 1 is available now. It is a bridge: Anthropic needed immediate capacity to survive the next six months, until Amazon's and Google's 5 GW come online.

According to Forbes, Anthropic's and OpenAI's contracts alone account for more than half of the $2 trillion in order books at the major cloud providers. The entire industry is saturated, to the point that Google, which has its own AI chips (TPUs), also signed with xAI on June 5, 2026, for $920 million per month as an "immediate capacity bridge."

What SpaceX gains (and why Musk changed his mind)

According to Axios (May 20, 2026), xAI collects $1.25 billion per month, or $15 billion per year, for a datacenter it was no longer using at full capacity: Colossus 2 is operational, and Colossus 1 had become a fixed cost generating no revenue. The SpaceX S-1 prospectus (May 2026) specifies that the deal was extended to include Colossus 2 as well. For Musk, leasing to Anthropic turns dormant assets into a massive argument for SpaceX's IPO, expected at a valuation of $2 trillion.

Why is Elon Musk leasing his weapon to his competitor?

The answer comes down to three words: Colossus 2 exists. xAI migrated Grok's training to its Colossus 2 cluster (operational in early 2026), turning Colossus 1, with its 220,000 GPUs, into an underutilized asset. Since June 2026, xAI has also been leasing GB200 capacity on Colossus 2 to Anthropic, according to Tom Brown on X, and signed a similar agreement with Google on June 5, 2026, at $920 million per month for ~110,000 additional GPUs. xAI has become a full-fledged AI infrastructure landlord.

Musk made a cold calculation. An empty datacenter consuming energy without generating revenue is a cash hemorrhage. Leasing it to Anthropic turns a fixed cost into a revenue stream, right as SpaceX prepares its IPO.

And the timing is no coincidence. According to Al Jazeera, the deal was announced while Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI was still ongoing. That lawsuit has since been resolved: on May 18, 2026, a federal jury in Oakland dismissed all claims in under two hours (status: closed, Musk has announced an appeal). xAI is looking to go public as early as next month. Having Anthropic as a client legitimizes the group's "third-party compute" division. It is no longer just an internal AI lab: it is a credible infrastructure provider.

Should we take orbital compute seriously?

The announcement mentions "expressed interest" in developing gigawatts of AI compute in orbit. This is pure SpaceX: spectacular on paper, useful for the investor pitch. Is it realistic in the short term? No. But it positions SpaceX as the only player capable of offering compute capacity beyond terrestrial limits (unlimited solar energy, free cooling in space).

On r/singularity, one comment captures the community reaction well: "I wasn't expecting a partnership with Elon of all people to solve the god-awful usage limits." Pragmatism wins over ideology.

What actually changes for Claude users

Since May 6, 2026: the 5-hour rate limits on Claude Code have been doubled for all paying subscribers, peak-hour throttling has been eliminated, and the Claude Opus API capacity jumps from 30,000 to 500,000 input tokens per minute for Tier 1. The weekly limit, however, remains unchanged.

Which limits were raised?

Three immediate changes, announced on May 6, 2026, by Anthropic:

Claude Code rate limits are doubled for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. The 5-hour limit goes from single to double. Note: the weekly limit stays the same. You can burn through your tokens faster, but you cannot consume more over the week.

Peak-hour throttling is gone for Pro and Max accounts. For months, Anthropic had been reducing capacity when too many users were connected simultaneously. That is over.

API limits for Claude Opus skyrocket. Tier 1 users go from 30,000 to 500,000 input tokens per minute. The highest tier jumps from 2 million to 10 million inputs per minute, and output goes from 400K to 800K tokens per minute.

What does this mean for an SMB using Claude?

If you are running AI agents in your business, this added capacity is not a nice-to-have: it is reliability. An agent that crashes mid-workflow because it hit its limit means lost time, manual retries, and frustration.

I see it every week with the teams I work with. The value of AI is not in the model alone. It is in seamless integration with business processes. And seamless integration requires a service that doesn't go down every two hours.

For more on the practical implementation of reliable agents, the GoLive Software blog covers the development side in depth.

The real lesson: AI is won at the infrastructure layer

In 2026, the constraint is no longer the algorithm; it is the watt. Energy, GPUs, and fiber determine who can train the best models and serve them at scale. The Anthropic-SpaceX deal is simply the most visible symptom of this reality.

Why the model alone is no longer enough

According to Goldman Sachs Research (May 2026), cumulative global investment in AI infrastructure could reach $7.6 trillion between 2026 and 2031, with more than 80% of that spending still ahead. According to the OECD, global AI investments exceeded $300 billion in 2024, confirming an exponential trajectory. According to Morgan Stanley, AI diffusion could create a $40 trillion addressable market over the long term. These projections differ on the amounts but converge on one point: infrastructure demand will be colossal.

The gold rush parallel is overused, but it still holds. The biggest winners were not the gold prospectors: they were the people selling shovels. In 2026 AI, the shovels are called GPUs, megawatts, and fiber optics.

Microsoft is restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its AI datacenters. Amazon is building facilities next to nuclear plants. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA, Electricity 2024 report), global datacenter electricity consumption nearly doubled over the 2022-2026 period, driven primarily by AI. The constraint is no longer the algorithm. It is electricity, literally.

What is the risk for businesses betting on Claude?

The risk is not that Anthropic disappears. It is that dependence on an infrastructure ecosystem creates fragility. Today Anthropic leases from xAI. Tomorrow, if the relationship sours, those 220,000 GPUs can be reclaimed.

On Reddit, a comment from the r/singularity community asks the uncomfortable question: "What prevents Elon from stealing their weights?" The technical answer exists (encryption, contractual agreements, security audits), but the question reveals a truth: when you don't own your infrastructure, you're a tenant of your own destiny.

Two clauses make this dependence even more concrete. First, according to Simon Willison's analysis (May 7, 2026), the contract gives xAI the right to reclaim the compute if Anthropic's AI causes "harm to humanity," with criteria left undefined, at Musk's discretion. Second, Musk publicly stated in June 2026 that SpaceX could take back capacity if it became "super tight" for its own needs (status: clause active, no activation to date). The 180-day lease with 90-day notice reflects this power dynamic: it was xAI that imposed the short duration, not Anthropic.

This is exactly what I tell my SMB clients: the right question is not "which AI tool should I use?" but "what does my workflow depend on, and is that dependency under control?" A structured AI audit always starts by mapping those dependencies.

My verdict: a rational deal in an irrational world

At $1.25 billion per month, the Anthropic-SpaceX partnership is neither an ethical scandal nor a stroke of strategic genius: it is a calculated time-buy in a market where every available megawatt trades above its real value.

"The real value is not in the model. It is in the ability to run it reliably, 24/7, without interruption."

Vincent, May 2026

Anthropic needed GPUs now, xAI had an idle datacenter to monetize. The moral of the story is pragmatic.

What strikes me is that the same debate plays out at a different scale in every SMB. Companies integrating AI into their operations hit the same wall as Anthropic: compute capacity is not infinite, reliability has a cost, and dependence on a single provider is a risk. The right posture is not to flee AI out of fear of dependence. It is to integrate it while understanding exactly where the points of fragility lie.

The companies that win are not the ones with the best model. They are the ones with the capacity to run it without interruption, in the right place, at the right time.

Frequently asked questions

What are Colossus 1 and Colossus 2, the datacenters at the heart of the deal?

Colossus 1 is the first supercomputer built by xAI, Elon Musk's AI division folded into SpaceX in early 2026, at an industrial site in Memphis, Tennessee. According to Wired, it houses a mix of NVIDIA GPUs (H100, H200, and GB200) totaling 220,000 units with a power capacity of 300 megawatts. Commissioned in 2024 to train Grok, it was partially freed up when Colossus 2 came online in early 2026. Colossus 2 is the newer, second cluster, primarily dedicated to training Grok, but xAI has also been leasing GB200 capacity on it to Anthropic since June 2026, according to Tom Brown on X. Both physical facilities remain the property of xAI.

Did Anthropic buy the Colossus 1 datacenter?

No, it is a lease agreement. Anthropic pays $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for access to the compute capacity of the Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 clusters (300 MW+, 220,000+ GPUs), but xAI retains ownership of the facilities in Memphis, Tennessee. The contract includes an exit clause with 90-day notice for either party. The total over the full term is ~$45 billion according to SpaceX's S-1 prospectus (May 2026).

Have the weekly limits on Claude Code increased?

No. Only the 5-hour limit has doubled. In practice, you can consume your tokens in faster bursts, but the weekly cap remains the same. It is a throughput improvement, not a total volume increase.

Why did Elon Musk agree to lease to a competitor?

xAI migrated Grok's training to Colossus 2. Colossus 1 had become an idle asset consuming energy without generating revenue. Musk said he spent time with the Anthropic team and was "impressed." SpaceX's upcoming IPO also makes this type of contract attractive to investors.

Which GPUs are used in Colossus 1?

According to Wired, the cluster contains a mix of NVIDIA GPUs ranging from H100 and H200 to the newer GB200. This diversity allows Anthropic to distribute different workloads (inference vs. fine-tuning) based on each chip generation's characteristics.

Is the deal really planned for 3 years?

Most outlets have cited the ~$45 billion over 3 years figure, which appears in SpaceX's S-1 (May 2026) for a term running through May 2029. But Elon Musk clarified in June 2026 that the actual structure is an initial 180-day lease (roughly through November 2026), with a mutual 90-day termination clause. "The short term was our ask, not Anthropic's," he said. The deal could be renewed through May 2029, or end much sooner, especially if xAI reclaims the capacity for its own needs.

Does this deal guarantee the end of outages on Claude Code?

Not entirely. The additional capacity eases immediate pressure, but Anthropic acknowledges that demand growth continues to accelerate. The real stability gains will come when the Amazon (1 GW, late 2026) and Google (5 GW, 2027) agreements are operational. The xAI deal is a bridge, not a permanent solution.

Vidéos YouTube

• Anthropic SpaceX explained 6min.. · Caleb Writes Code
• Anthropic Just Made A Deal With Elon Musk (Nobody Saw This Coming) · Insight Engine
• Inside Anthropic's $7B Deal With Elon's Data Center · The Best One Yet
• Anthropic JUST Partnered With SpaceX… Claude's Usage limit Increased?! · The Next Signal

Discussions Reddit

• Anthropic partnered with SpaceX to use colossus 1 to increase their rate limits · r/singularity
• Anthropic partnered with SpaceX for compute · r/singularity

Articles & ressources

• Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX · anthropic.com
• Anthropic will pay xAI $1.25B per month for compute · techcrunch.com
• Anthropic is paying SpaceX $15 billion per year · axios.com
• SpaceX $45B Anthropic Deal, Colossus I & II · benzinga.com
• Elon Musk loses lawsuit against OpenAI (May 18, 2026) · aljazeera.com
• Anthropic inks SpaceX deal ahead of $2 trillion IPO · hothardware.com
• Anthropic Gets in Bed With SpaceX as the AI Race Turns Weird · wired.com
• Anthropic, SpaceX announce compute deal, includes space development · cnbc.com
• Anthropic Just Signed A Compute Deal With Elon Musk's SpaceX · forbes.com
• SpaceX backs Anthropic with data centre deal amidst Musk's OpenAI lawsuit · aljazeera.com
• Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal (Simon Willison, May 7, 2026) · simonwillison.net
• Musk says SpaceX's Colossus AI agreement with Anthropic currently limited to six months · finance.yahoo.com
• Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute (June 5, 2026) · techcrunch.com
• Tom Brown on X: expansion to Colossus 2 in June 2026 · xcancel.com