Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, at the company’s Builder Summit in Bangalore, India, on February 16, 2026.
Samyukta Lakshmi | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Anthropic on Wednesday announced a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use all the computing power at the company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee.
As part of the agreement, Anthropic will have access to more than 300 megawatts of computing power and has “expressed interest” in working with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of computing power in space. Anthropic said the deal will directly increase capacity for paying Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers.
The deal comes after Musk, who this year merged SpaceX with competing AI startup xAI, repeatedly criticized Anthropic for its clashes with the U.S. government. Musk said Anthropic was “destined to be the opposite of its name,” and asked if there was a “more hypocritical company than Anthropic.”
“Humanity hates Western Civilization,” Musk wrote in February.
But on Wednesday, Musk changed his tune. In a post to X, he said he spent a lot of time with senior members of the Anthropic team last week and was “impressed.”
“Everyone I met was extremely competent and extremely concerned about doing the right thing. None of them set off my evil detector,” Musk wrote. “Claude is probably good as long as they engage in critical self-examination.”
Musk spent much of last week in federal court in Oakland, California, testifying for three days in a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman.
In another post about X on Wednesday, Musk said xAI would be “disbanded as a separate company” and called SpaceXAI.
XAI has been building its data infrastructure primarily around Memphis to compete with OpenAI in the burgeoning AI market. google And humanity. Colossus 1 is the largest facility to date.
In building and operating Colossus, xAI and its subsidiary, MZX Tech, LLC, installed and operated dozens of natural gas-fired turbines to power the facility, but argued that these were only for temporary use and did not require federal permits.
The turbines reportedly exacerbated air pollution problems around Memphis and sparked persistent protests against xAI’s activities in the area.
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 is currently in talks with investors to raise funding at a valuation of $900 billion, as previously reported by CNBC.
Anthropic said last month that demand for Claude has put an “inevitable strain on our infrastructure,” impacting “reliability and performance” for users, especially during peak times.
The company is working to increase its capabilities with several computing deals, including a multibillion-dollar deal in recent weeks. Amazon.
The company is also engaged in months of contentious negotiations with the U.S. government.
In March, the Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk and blacklisted it from working with the U.S. military after the two countries failed to reach an agreement on how to use the company’s models. Anthropic has sued the Trump administration in San Francisco and Washington in an attempt to overturn the Pentagon’s actions, and the lawsuits are ongoing.
Meanwhile, the Department of Defense has adopted xAI’s Grok model, along with products from other AI companies.
—CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report
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