Anthropic to use SpaceX’s Colossus 1 supercomputer for inference

Anthropic PBC today announced that it will use SpaceX Corp.’s Colossus 1 supercomputer to power its Claude chatbot.

The system was originally built in 2024 by xAI Holdings Corp., an artificial intelligence venture that Elon Musk launched the year prior. SpaceX obtained Colossus 1 when it acquired xAI earlier this year.

The supercomputer, which is hosted in a data center near Memphis, contains more than 220,000 Nvidia Corp. graphics cards. Anthropic expects those chips to provide 300 megawatts of computing capacity for Claude. The company will use that processing power to process requests from users subscribed to the chatbot’s Pro and Max editions.

Anthropic is also raising the usage limits of Claude Code and Claude’s application programming interface. The former product’s request volume cap, which resets every five hours, has been doubled. API users, in turn, can now process significantly more input and output tokens per minute.

Anthropic may expand its use of SpaceX infrastructure over time. The latter company stated today that Anthropic has “expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”

SpaceX revealed its intention to deploy data centers in space at the end of January. According to the company, the plan is to launch satellites that can each carry 100 kilowatts worth of AI hardware. Several thousand such satellites would be necessary to provide the multi-gigawatt capacity pool in which Anthropic is reportedly interested.

The satellites will generate the electricity necessary to power their onboard chips using a large solar panel array. Additionally, each system is expected to feature a 1,079-square-foot radiator. The radiator will emit the heat generated by the onboard chips into space in the form of infrared radiation.

SpaceX plans to build the AI chips that will power the satellites at a new in-house fab campus in Texas. According to a filing published this week, the company plans to spend at least $55 billion on the facility. SpaceX estimates that the project budget could more than double over time.

Anthropic, for its part, also plans to source computing capacity from other partners. 

Amazon.com Inc. will provide the AI developer with nearly 1 gigawatts of processing power by year’s end as part of a partnership announced last month. The collaboration will also see the retail and cloud giant invest as much as $25 billion to Anthropic. In the long term, Amazon will provide the AI developer with up to 4 gigawatts of with additional infrastructure.

Anthropic recently inked a similarly-sized AI hardware deal with Broadcom Inc. and Google LLC. The two companies will start bringing the computing capacity online in 2027.

SpaceX, for its part, is currently building out a second supercomputer located not far from Colossus 1. Colossus 2, as the system is called, is expected to provide two gigawatts of computing capacity. It will feature 550,000 B200 chips at full capacity. 

The deal with Anthropic raises the possibility that SpaceX will sell access to Colossus 2. Entering the AI infrastructure market could open new revenue streams for the company and drive up interest in its upcoming IPO. SpaceX reportedly hopes to raise $75 billion at a $2 trillion valuation later this year.

Image: Anthropic