Why behind AI: Wheelin’ and Dealin’

The Musk games continue

SpaceXAI has signed an agreement with Anthropic to provide access to Colossus 1, one of the world’s largest and fastest-deployed AI supercomputers.

Built from the ground up in record time, Colossus delivers unprecedented scale for AI training, fine-tuning, inference, and high-performance computing workloads. Colossus 1 features over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators. The cluster delivers extreme parallel performance for large language models, multimodal systems, scientific simulations, and generative AI at frontier scale.

Anthropic plans to use this additional compute to directly improve capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers.

As part of this agreement, Anthropic also expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.

The compute required to train and operate the next generation of these systems is outpacing what terrestrial power, land, and cooling can deliver on the timelines that matter.

SpaceX is the only organization with the launch cadence, mass-to-orbit economics, and constellation operations experience to make orbital compute a near-term engineering program rather than a research concept. If engineering challenges can be overcome, space-based compute offers near-limitless sustainable power with less impact on Earth.

Musk has been very aggressive in making rapid changes at xAI, which means he has identified this as the place with the largest bottlenecks in his cluster of companies.

It’s been barely two months since SpaceX and xAI were combined. Then essentially the full founding team left (or was made to leave). Two weeks ago a critical deal was announced: Cursor will train models in the Colossus data center, and will either be acquired for $60B or have its year of work bought for $10B.

Now all of a sudden Anthropic, a company that Musk has had repeated clashes with, gets access to the most important commodity in the world right now, compute?

Let’s try to untangle this.