Anthropic announced on Wednesday a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which acquired xAI in February, for the entirety of compute capacity at the Colossus 1 supercomputer in Memphis. The arrangement gives Anthropic access to more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs and over 300 megawatts of capacity inside a month, and it triggers a parallel round of rate-limit increases for paying Claude subscribers who have been hitting caps.
The announcement also includes a footnote of unusual ambition. Anthropic and SpaceX have, in xAI’s announcement language, “expressed interest” in jointly developing multiple gigawatts of compute capacity in orbit.
What Sam Altman Sees
Musk is currently in week two of a federal trial in which he is asking a court to remove Sam Altman and Greg Brockman from OpenAI and to unwind the corporate restructuring that allowed OpenAI to become a roughly $800 billion company.
Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman and Brockman in 2015 and donated $38 million to the nonprofit at its founding. He has spent the decade since publicly arguing that Altman and Brockman betrayed the original mission, and he has named Microsoft as a co-defendant in the present case for allegedly aiding and abetting that betrayal. The trial began on April 27. Most legal analysts say Musk loses.
In the middle of all of that, the same Musk has signed a deal with the company that is, by most reasonable measures, OpenAI’s most threatening commercial rival.
Anthropic’s annualized revenue went from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion by the end of March, driven by demand for its coding products. As of late April, Anthropic had edged past OpenAI in LLM revenue for the first time. OpenAI investors have reportedly been having second thoughts, in private conversations and, in some cases, on the record.
Musk publicly said he had spent time with senior members of the Anthropic team and was “impressed.” xAI, in court testimony, has admitted that it distills OpenAI models. The same xAI’s GPUs are now what Anthropic will use to train and serve the products eating OpenAI’s lunch.
It is fair to assume Sam Altman read the announcement with some interest.
The Portfolio
Anthropic is now buying compute from essentially everyone. As of Wednesday the list reads: Amazon, under the $100-billion Trainium structure; Google, under a $200-billion five-year cloud agreement; CoreWeave; Broadcom, for custom silicon development; the in-house buildout led by Microsoft’s former Azure AI chief at a stated $50 billion; and now SpaceX’s Colossus 1.
The five-year committed compute spend across those arrangements is north of $300 billion. Anthropic is still leasing 300 megawatts from a competitor.
Compute is scarce, in other words. The scarcity stopped being a question of capital, which is plainly available, some time ago. It is now a question of physical capacity, which is not.
What is in short supply is grid-interconnection queue slots, lead time on power-purchase agreements, and the years it takes to build a 300-megawatt facility from scratch. At the frontier in 2026, even $300 billion in committed multi-year spend does not free a company from leasing 300 megawatts from its loudest critic, because that is what is available to lease.
What Each Side Gets
Anthropic gets compute that comes online inside a month, which is the rarest thing on the AI market right now. It also gets a third major compute supplier outside Amazon and Google, which de-risks single-vendor concentration in a way the company has plainly been trying to engineer for the past year. Claude Pro and Claude Max users get higher rate limits, which is the visible product consequence and the part most subscribers will notice.
Musk gets revenue, which xAI’s recent funding cadence suggests it could use more of. He also gets the most credible possible argument that Colossus 1 is a genuinely frontier-grade facility, because the most safety-conscious frontier lab on earth has just chosen it.
And he gets, in a courtroom-adjacent way, a peer AI titan publicly choosing to do business with him over the alternatives. That last item does not show up on a balance sheet. It is, however, the sort of thing that helps.
Claude Is Going to Space
The other footnote in xAI’s announcement is the one that turned a routine compute deal into something stranger. Anthropic and SpaceX have, per the xAI release, “expressed interest” in jointly developing multiple gigawatts of compute capacity in orbit.
The phrase is doing a lot of work. “Expressed interest” is the carefully chosen kind of commitment that does not commit to anything specific, and orbital data centers in 2026 are still mostly engineering claim and very little operating fleet. Starcloud reached orbit in March with a single demonstrator satellite, and that was treated, correctly, as a notable event.
So the proposition that Anthropic and SpaceX will jointly stand up multiple gigawatts of orbital inference capacity is, in 2026, science fiction. It is also not implausible as a 2030 proposition, particularly if SpaceX is the partner. SpaceX is the only entity on Earth that operates the launch capacity such a fleet would require, and Starship’s mass-to-orbit economics are the technical precondition under which orbital data centers stop being cute and start being cheaper than terrestrial alternatives at scale.
Two days before this announcement, Peter Thiel-backed Panthalassa raised $140 million to build wave-powered AI compute platforms in the Pacific. The shared thesis is the same. The constraints on land have become uncomfortable enough that exotic locations are now in serious conversations.
What This Adds Up To
The compute deal is real and arrives next month. The orbital footnote is real and arrives, if it arrives, years from now.
The thing the announcement is doing in the meantime is rearranging the chessboard. Anthropic is now compute-supplied by essentially everyone, and just edged past OpenAI in LLM revenue for the first time. OpenAI is in court watching its co-founder hand its chief rival the keys to a 220,000-GPU data center. By absolute measures, Sam Altman is still having a perfectly fine quarter, with $122 billion in fresh capital and revenue annualizing around $24 billion. But it’s getting weird.
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team