Elon Musk's SpaceX Will Help Power Anthropic's Claude in Surprise AI Deal

Musk added that “SpaceXAI” had already moved training to Colossus 2, a much larger next-generation AI supercomputer cluster designed to surpass Colossus 1’s roughly 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and support future Grok models.

The partnership comes as Musk and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have increasingly represented different camps inside the AI industry. Musk has aligned himself closely with Trump and the U.S. Departments of Justice and Defense. At the same time, Anthropic has positioned itself as one of the industry’s strongest advocates for responsible AI safety standards.

That stance recently put the company in conflict with the Trump administration and the Pentagon after Anthropic refused demands to allow unrestricted military use of Claude. The dispute centered on safeguards blocking the model from being used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. Trump later ordered federal agencies to phase out Anthropic’s technology, while Pentagon officials argued military contractors must permit “any lawful use” of AI systems used by the government.

The agreement underscores how the race for computing power is reshaping alliances across Silicon Valley. In February, Elon Musk folded xAI into SpaceX, arguing that electricity demand and cooling requirements are limiting the growth of Earth-based AI data centers. Musk clarified on X on Wednesday that the xAI entity will be dissolved, and that part of the business will be known as "SpaceXAI" going forward.

Also in March, Musk accused Anthropic of being “misanthropic” after the Claude developer raised $30 billion in funding at a $380 billion post-money valuation.

Despite his previous harsh words, Anthropic said the SpaceX deal adds to a growing list of infrastructure partnerships that already includes Amazon, Google, Broadcom, Microsoft, and Nvidia.

“As part of this agreement, we have also expressed interest in partnering with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity,” Anthropic said in a statement.

While orbital data centers remain experimental and face major engineering hurdles, SpaceX said terrestrial power, cooling infrastructure, and available land may not scale fast enough for future AI systems, driving interest in space-based compute as a potential source of larger and more sustainable energy supplies.

“If engineering challenges can be overcome, space-based compute offers near-limitless sustainable power with less impact on Earth,” the company said.