Anthropic, SpaceX announce compute deal that includes space development

Source: CNBC

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.

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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.

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Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/06/anthropic-spacex-data-center-capacity.html

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Much more at the link. The article points out that Musk had been trashing Anthropic for months.

But he hates OpenAI, which is Anthropic's chief rival.

And Anthropic is desperate for more compute capacity.

I skimmed Reddit's r/ClaudeAI to see reactions from those Anthropic customers using Claude, and a lot of them are very unhappy with this deal.

They hate Musk and don't know if their data when they use Claude will be safe from him.

They hate that polluting data center and don't want to be associated with it.

They're glad that the peak hours usage limit for Claude Code is gone now, but since the weekly usage limit stays the same, that's not any real improvement for many Claude users.

So they're seeing a slight improvement for some users, at the cost of it being dependent on a Musk-owned data center that's notorious for pollution.