xAI Selling $1.5 Billion of Compute to Anthropic Each Month

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There’s vast divergence of opinion on how useful AI systems, particularly LLMs (Large Language Models), are for our society. Some claim they bring us a massive leap forward and are completely worth all the money and energy being put into them. Others see them as incremental improvements (or worse) that are massively overhyped and over-invested in.

Personally, you can put me more in the latter camp. Ten years ago, you could Google something and find a good source to answer your question. Now, people Google something and get the AI-provided answer at the top or they go to ChatGPT instead and get a response there. It’s hard for me to notice a significant difference for what I do. Actually, considering that I don’t know if I can trust the AI or not (despite its authoritative tone), I am still digging, following links, and often trying to make sure I have a good source. Yes, perhaps there are certain fields (like coding) where AI is more useful. I see stories of that here and there.

Sometimes, though, some things just strike you regarding how much is getting put into this stuff. This week, it was reported that Anthropic (a top AI company that is the parent of Claude) is going to be sending $1.5 billion a month to xAI for compute. Yup, $1.5 billion! Per month! Nuts.

The Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee, which has been criticized for being massively and potentially illegally polluting, will be providing all 300 megawatts of its computer power to Anthropic. The deal is supposed to go through May 2029, totaling more than $40 billion of revenue for xAI.

xAI is part of SpaceX now, of course, and it was through a SpaceX S-1 filing with the SEC that we found out about this.

Either party can cancel the partnership with 90 days’ notice. So, yeah, things could go badly for xAI’s revenue stream if something changed at Anthropic and it decided it didn’t need the compute. Overall, though, I’d guess xAI is going to be quite happy about the business.

There is a grey side to this whole story for xAI and SpaceX, though. That compute was supposed to be used by Grok originally. With less demand for Grok than hoped, there’s a lot of extra compute sitting there underutilized. With the SpaceX IPO coming up, they had to do something to make this look good, so they are selling the extra capacity to one of their top competitors. Hmm, is that a win or not a win? Well, either way, it is what it is. “We expect to enter into additional similar services contracts,” the SpaceX filing adds.

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