Key Points
- SpaceX's compute deals with Anthropic, Google, and Reflection total over $76 billion through 2029
- Anthropic pays $1.25 billion a month, Google $920 million, and Reflection $150 million
- The capacity runs on SpaceX's Colossus complex, which reaches roughly 1 gigawatt alongside xAI
- Each contract carries a 90-day termination clause, with exits possible in early 2027
The company building rockets to Mars has found a more terrestrial line of business: renting computing power to the AI labs it competes with. SpaceX has now signed three compute-rental deals — with Anthropic, Google, and the startup Reflection — that together could be worth more than $76 billion in revenue through 2029, according to a Motley Fool tally of the contracts.
The figures are large and getting larger. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion a month for more than 300 megawatts of capacity — over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs — in a deal worth north of $40 billion. Google followed at $920 million a month starting in October, a contract that runs to June 2029 and tops $30 billion. Reflection, a younger lab, signed on for $150 million a month, or $6.3 billion. Anthropic took the entire Colossus 1 in Memphis; the Google and Reflection capacity draws from SpaceX's broader Colossus complex, which runs to roughly one gigawatt of compute alongside Elon Musk's xAI.
What makes this notable is the role reversal. SpaceX is chasing its own AI ambitions — it just agreed to acquire Cursor parent Anysphere for $60 billion — yet it is simultaneously the landlord collecting rent from rivals like Google and Anthropic. Right now compute, not the model, is the scarce input — and SpaceX is monetizing the shortage while its tenants pay to wait out their own data-center buildouts. The catch is written into the contracts: each carries a 90-day termination clause, and the moment these tenants finish their own capacity, the rent stops. SpaceX is leasing from strength to companies whose stated goal is to no longer need it.
That tension sits underneath the company's record $1.75 trillion IPO filing: the rental income is real cash today, but its durability depends on the GPU crunch lasting and on SpaceX's own orbital data-center plans arriving later this decade as promised.
Source: The Motley Fool, TechCrunch, CNBC
Comments