Elon Musk revealed that both Google and Anthropic are renting artificial intelligence compute capacity from SpaceX, highlighting how his space company has quietly become a major player in AI infrastructure. Musk made the comments amid growing power supply constraints affecting the entire technology industry, while claiming SpaceX currently leads rival companies in efficiently deploying AI computing infrastructure.
Musk explained that bringing large-scale AI data centers online requires enormous physical investment. This includes building massive power generation facilities, transformers, liquid cooling loops, and cooling systems, alongside extremely complex network infrastructure. Because computing clusters for AI model training demand such specialized resources, few companies can deploy them quickly, which Musk argues gives SpaceX a decisive advantage.
To bring large AI data centers online requires building massive power plants, transformers, liquid cooling loops & chillers, as well as incredibly complex networking (especially for training clusters) https://t.co/pRBdDsOY1Q
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2026
The statements build on a series of massive deals SpaceX struck throughout 2026. In May, SpaceX agreed to give Anthropic access to roughly 325,000 NVIDIA GPUs across its Colossus data centers for $1.25 billion per month. Weeks later, it signed a similar agreement providing Google with about 110,000 GPUs for $920 million monthly. Together, these two contracts could generate roughly $26 billion annually, exceeding SpaceX’s entire revenue from the previous year.
These arrangements emerged from an unusual situation within the AI industry. Anthropic grew so explosively, expanding from $1 billion in annual recurring revenue to $35 billion within roughly a year, that its existing cloud providers could not supply capacity fast enough. Since power grid connections typically take five to ten years and GPUs can take up to a year to arrive, companies faced severe bottlenecks that SpaceX was positioned to fill.
SpaceX built this capability through its merger with xAI, Musk’s AI company, which originally constructed the Colossus infrastructure near Memphis, Tennessee. The company reported AI revenue of $2.6 billion in the second quarter, up 213% sequentially, alongside $14.1 billion in contracted cloud agreements. SpaceX ended the quarter with 1.4 gigawatts of nameplate compute, expecting to exceed two gigawatts by year-end.
The compute rental business increasingly appears central to justifying SpaceX’s enormous valuation, which reached $1.8 trillion following its record-breaking IPO. Because Grok has yet to seriously challenge competitors, these infrastructure deals demonstrate an alternative, proven path toward profitability within SpaceX’s AI division.
