Anthropic has ‘expressed interest’ to co-develop data centres in space, said SpaceX.

Anthropic has agreed to purchase compute capacity from Space X’s AI supercomputer Colossus 1, marking the latest in the multibillion-dollar industrial tie-up between AI companies and infrastructure providers. Terms of the deal between the two companies remain undisclosed.

This, as well as Anthropic’s other recent compute deals, including with Amazon and Google, is allowing the company to increase usage limits for Claude Code and Claude API.

The company announced yesterday (6 May) that it is doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans; removing the peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max users; and raising API rate limits “considerably” for Claude Opus models.

Colossus 1 features more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, including dense deployments of H100 and H200 chips, and the newer GB200 accelerators.

The Tennessee-based data centre, considered to be one of the world’s largest, came under regulatory scrutiny earlier this year after it was ruled that the xAI – now under SpaceX – acted illegally by using methane gas turbines to power Colossus 1 and 2.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX purchased his other company xAI in February to further his goals of creating space-based data centres. The combined entity is called SpaceXAI.

Musk, at the time, said that the merger would allow for data centres to be transported to space in order to harness near-constant solar energy from the Sun. SpaceX’s Starship rockets are expected to begin delivering its next-generation satellites into orbit this year, according his comments.

As part of its agreement with SpaceX, Anthropic has also “expressed interest” in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity, the two jointly said. Both companies are preparing to file historic initial public offerings this year, with Anthropic hitting a $1.2trn implied valuation and SpaceX targeting $1.75trn.

“Grateful to be partnering with SpaceX here. We are going to need to move a lot of atoms in order to keep up with AI demand, and there’s nobody better at quickly moving atoms (on or off planet Earth),” said Anthropic co-founder and chief compute officer Tom Brown in a post on X.

Musk, meanwhile, said members at Anthropic were “highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing.” These comments from Musk come just months after he called Claude “misanthropic and evil” for allegedly “hat[ing]” people of certain races, as well as “heterosexuals and men”.

Earlier this week, Anthropic partnered with investment giants Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to form a new AI services company, further cementing itself into the enterprise market as AI inevitably becomes a core productivity tool.

In April, SpaceX said that it had an agreement in place to acquire AI start-up Cursor for $60bn. Cursor plans to leverage the Colossus infrastructure to scale up the intelligence of its models.

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