Anthropic Gets Into Bed With SpaceX As The AI ​​Race Gets Weird

Anthropic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX said Wednesday that the two companies have signed an agreement to allow Anthropic to use computers from the xAI data center in Memphis, Tennessee. It’s the latest collaboration in the industry’s quest to find enough computing power to run complex AI applications. SpaceX and xAI were previously separate companies, but the two merged earlier this year. The combined group, which also includes Musk, is called SpaceXAI.

Anthropic executives made the announcement on stage at the software industry’s annual conference in San Francisco. SpaceXAI as well write a blog post sharing details of the partnership, which will see Anthropic drawing power from xAI’s Colossus 1 supercomputer.

The deal comes at an important time for SpaceXAI, which plans to go public next month. A relationship with a leading AI lab could boost SpaceX’s credibility as it positions investors on the potential gold mine of space deployments, including in space.

Specifically, Space XAI he said in its blog post that Anthropic has “expressed interest” in collaborating to develop “orbital AI compute capacity” — essentially, a data center in space. Having Anthropic as a potential customer could help SpaceXAI increase business confidence that there will be buyers for its high-cost project.

Earlier this year, Musk criticized anthropic versions of AI in the post on Xcalling the company’s policies “misanthropic” and “evil,” and claiming without evidence that AI models exhibit racism and sexism.

Now, he’s changed his tune a lot, writing on X that he “spent a lot of time last week with the executives of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure that Claude is good for people and he was impressed.”

Musk’s SpaceXAI is set to break ground on Colossus 1 at the former Electrolux facility in 2024. The company claims it is one of the largest and fastest AI machines in the world. It includes about 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, from Nvidia’s H100 and H200 to the new GB200 chips. The company loves it boasting that it built a super machine in 122 days.

Emissions from gas turbines at the data center caused many complaints from the community. Last month, environmentalists showed at the local SpaceX crowd gathering ahead of the IPO.

Anthropic plans to use its new computing power to “directly replace Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers,” both companies said. The deal will give Anthropic access to more than 300 megawatts of new capacity, or about 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. In recent months, programmers have complained a lot about the price limitations and the disruption of work in Claude Code, due to the limitations of the resources available on the computer.

As more and more people use services like OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code, sometimes running code programs and technical projects for hours on end – jobs are shrinking. According to Anthropic, the average developer now spends 20 hours a week running Claude Code.

Yesterday, The Information report that Anthropic committed to spending $200 billion on Google’s AI cloud services and TPU chips. Anthropic has also used Amazon’s cloud computing services and AI chips since 2023. Last month, Anthropic he volunteered “Over $100 billion over the next decade in (Amazon) technologies.” According to the Information report, the contracts with Anthropic and OpenAI now take “more than half of the $ 2 trillion left for the big cloud providers” such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Paresh Dave and Zoe Schiffer contributed to this article.