Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, during the company’s Builder Summit in Bengaluru, India, on Monday, Feb. 16, 2026.
Samyukta Lakshmi | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Anthropic on Wednesday announced a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at his company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee.
As part of the agreement, Anthropic will get access to more than 300 megawatts of compute capacity, and it also “expressed interest” in working with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of compute capacity in space. Anthropic said the deal will directly improve capacity for its paid Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers.
The deal lands after Musk, who runs a competing AI company called xAI (now owned by SpaceX) has emerged as a vocal critic of Anthropic, largely because of the company’s spat with the U.S. government in recent months. Musk has posted on X that Anthropic is “doomed to become the opposite of its name,” which would be misanthropic, and has asked if there’s a “more hypocritical company than Anthropic.”
“Anthropic hates Western Civilization,” Musk wrote in a post on X in February.
XAI has been building out its data infrastructure, primarily around Memphis, as it races to compete in the booming AI market against OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Colossus 1 is its largest facility to-date.
When building and running Colossus, xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech, LLC, installed and operated dozens of natural gas-burning turbines to power the facility, claiming that no federal permit was required to do so because they were only for temporary use. The turbines reportedly worsened air pollution problems around Memphis, and led to persistent protests against xAI’s work in the region.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of executives and researchers who defected from OpenAI. The company is best known for developing a family of AI models called Claude, and it’s currently in talks with investors about raising cash at a valuation of $900 billion, as CNBC previously reported.
In March, the Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, blacklisting it from work with the U.S. military, after the two sides failed to come to an agreement on how the company’s models could be used. Anthropic sued the Trump administration in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. to try to reverse the Pentagon’s actions, and that litigation is still ongoing.
Meanwhile, the Defense Department has been embracing xAI’s Grok model, along with offerings from other AI companies.
–CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report
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