The deal gives Anthropic access to more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs and will double rate limits for Claude Code users
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. (Bloomberg / Getty Images)
Wednesday's announcement from Anthropic detailed a new compute arrangement with SpaceX covering the full capacity of Colossus 1, a data center in Memphis, Tennessee, with access to more than 300 megawatts and over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, according to the two companies.
The deal will directly improve capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers, Anthropic said. The company is also using the expanded compute to raise usage limits across several of its products, effective immediately.
Specifically, Anthropic is doubling Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans, removing peak-hours limit reductions for Pro and Max accounts, and raising API rate limits for its Claude Opus models.
Beyond the Memphis facility, the two companies said Anthropic has signaled ambitions to eventually pursue multiple gigawatts of AI compute capacity in orbit with SpaceX. SpaceX said on its xAI news page that space-based compute could offer power without the land and cooling constraints facing terrestrial data centers.
The SpaceX deal joins a series of other compute agreements Anthropic has announced. Those include an up to 5 gigawatt agreement with Amazon $AMZN that includes almost 1 gigawatt of new capacity by the end of 2026, a 5 gigawatt agreement with Google $GOOGL and Broadcom $AVGO coming online in 2027, a strategic partnership with Microsoft $MSFT and NVIDIA covering $30 billion of Azure capacity, and a $50 billion infrastructure investment with Fluidstack.
The deal is notable for pairing two rivals. Elon Musk, whose AI venture xAI was absorbed into SpaceX, has publicly attacked Anthropic on multiple occasions, according to CNBC. Colossus 1 is among several data center projects xAI has pursued in Tennessee and Mississippi as it works to scale up its computing footprint, according to Bloomberg.
Colossus 1 features dense deployments of H100, H200, and GB200 NVIDIA accelerators, according to SpaceX. Residents and activists have raised pollution concerns about the site, according to CNBC, pointing to dozens of gas-burning turbines xAI brought in to supply power — equipment that critics say has degraded air quality in surrounding Memphis neighborhoods.
Anthropic said some of its capacity expansion will be international, with Amazon infrastructure being added in Asia and Europe to meet data residency requirements for enterprise customers in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and government.
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