Anthropic on Wednesday announced a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use all the computing power at the latter’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. Anthropic will receive more than 300 megawatts of computing power as part of the agreement, and it has "expressed interest" in working with SpaceX to develop several gigawatts of computing power in space. Anthropic said the deal will directly improve the experience for its paying customers (Claude Pro and Claude Max).
Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei
Musk, who this year merged SpaceX with rival AI startup xAI, has repeatedly criticized Anthropic over its conflicts with the U.S. government. Musk has said that Anthropic is "destined to become the opposite of its name," that is, to become "misanthropic," and he has asked "if there is a more hypocritical company than Anthropic."
Musk wrote in February: "Anthropic hates Western civilization."
But on Wednesday, Musk changed his tune. He posted on the X platform that he spent a lot of time with senior members of the Anthropic team over the past week and that he was "very impressed."
Musk wrote: "Everyone I met was extremely capable and cared deeply about doing the right thing. No one triggered my evil detector. As long as they critically self-examined, Claude will most likely be fine."
Musk has spent much of the past week in federal court in Oakland, California, where he is fighting the indictment. The case against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman featured three consecutive days of testimony.
In another post on the X platform on Wednesday, Musk said that "xAI will be dissolved as an independent company" and will be renamed SpaceXAI.
xAI has been building out its data infrastructure, mostly around Memphis, to compete with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic in the booming AI market. Colossus 1 is its largest facility to date.
While building and operating Colossus, xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech, LLC installed and operated dozens of natural gas-fueled turbines to power the facility, claiming that no federal permit was required because the turbines were for temporary use only.
The turbines have reportedly contributed to air pollution problems around Memphis and sparked ongoing protests against xAI’s work in the area.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of executives and researchers who left OpenAI. The company is best known for the line of AI models it developed called Claude. As previously reported, the company is currently negotiating with investors to seek financing at a valuation of US$900 billion.
Last month, Anthropic said demand for Claude had caused "inevitable stress on our infrastructure," impacting "reliability and performance" for users, especially during peak hours.
The company has been working to increase its computing power capacity by signing multiple computing power deals in recent weeks, including a multi-billion dollar deal with Amazon.
The company also endured months of contentious negotiations with the U.S. government.
In March this year, the Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk enterprise and blacklisted it from cooperating with the U.S. military after the two parties failed to reach an agreement on how to use the company's model. Anthropic sued the Trump administration in San Francisco and Washington in an attempt to overturn the Pentagon's decision, and the lawsuits are ongoing.
Meanwhile, the Department of Defense has been embracing xAI’s Grok model as well as products from other AI companies.