Earlier this month, artificial intelligence company Anthropic reached a computing power purchase agreement that shocked the industry with Elon Musk's xAI, contracting all 300 megawatts of computing power output at the Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee, USA. Infrastructure of this scale means extremely high costs:Anthropic will pay $1.25 billion to xAI every month from now to May 2029, and will enjoy discounted prices for the first two months while xAI completes its production ramp-up. Based on this calculation, the transaction is expected to bring total revenue of more than 40 billion US dollars to xAI.
Details of the deal come from SpaceX's filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The arrangement "allows us to monetize unused computing power in our infrastructure," SpaceX said in the filing. The terms of the contract also give both parties the right to terminate the agreement with 90 days' advance notice, leaving room for flexibility for future market changes. The document also states that the company "expects to sign more similar service contracts," suggesting that this model may be promoted on a larger scale.
Under this arrangement, xAI presents a "hybrid role" in the artificial intelligence market. Currently, most players either primarily build and operate data centers for their own use or exclusively provide infrastructure for third-party customers, and rarely play both roles simultaneously. This emerging model is sometimes called "neocloud". Its core idea is: when its own business needs are not enough to satisfy all computing power production capacity, AI companies will rent out excess resources as a "cloud service provider" to hedge against high infrastructure investment costs.
SpaceX believes this is a smart use of resources. "We believe that the dual monetization strategy provides multiple paths for returns on invested capital," the company wrote in its prospectus. However, it is not difficult for the industry to read the subtext behind it: xAI is obviously "over-allocated" in terms of computing power construction in stages, and it needs to improve asset utilization and revenue visibility through external sales at the juncture of preparing for a public listing. More importantly, the number of users of xAI’s flagship AI assistant Grok has dropped sharply in recent months, releasing a large number of idle servers, allowing it to sell these resources to competitors including Anthropic.
Against the background of current competition in AI infrastructure and capital market expectations, this large long-term computing power order not only locks in key resources for Anthropic in the next few years, but also opens up a new path for xAI and SpaceX behind it to tell growth stories through "selling computing power." For the entire industry, this case also provides a representative sample of how large model companies dynamically balance between "self-use" and "external services."