Anthropic Partners With SpaceX for Colossus 1 Compute, Plans ‘Orbital-Grade’ AI Capacity

Anthropic has formed a compute partnership with SpaceX to meet surging demand for Claude and Claude Code, gaining access to Colossus 1 and its more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs. The arrangement will expand service capacity and raise API usage limits, while underscoring the electricity and cooling constraints facing AI companies on Earth.

Anthropic’s CEO said compute demand grew 80-fold in the first quarter of 2026. The company will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month under a contract reportedly worth $45 billion, securing xAI’s spare capacity ahead of SpaceX’s June IPO. The companies are also planning several gigawatts of “orbital AI compute,” using solar energy to power data centers in space.