The clarification contradicts earlier reports of a deal running through May 2029, and raises questions about SpaceX's IPO disclosure
Ethan Swope / Bloomberg via Getty Images
In posts on X $TWTR on Thursday, Elon Musk walked back the prevailing read of SpaceX's arrangement with Anthropic, saying the Colossus deal is structured as a 180-day term followed by a mutual 90-day cancellation window — not the open-ended multi-year commitment that had been widely reported, according to Reuters.
"SpaceX has not committed to leasing Colossus for years, although it's possible that may be what happens," Musk wrote in a post on X. Earlier reports had framed the deal as running through May 2029, with Anthropic paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month for compute capacity at the Memphis, Tennessee facilities.
Musk said the short-term structure was SpaceX's preference, not Anthropic's. "We won't leave them hanging and will provide a reasonable off-ramp, but if compute gets super tight I said we might need it back at some point," he wrote.
Under the agreement, Anthropic gains use of the Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, a cluster built around more than 220,000 Nvidia $NVDA GPUs capable of drawing over 300 megawatts of power. The site had opened up for outside customers after xAI shifted its Grok training workloads to the larger Colossus 2 campus, according to The Next Web.
The clarification creates a potential disclosure gap in SpaceX's IPO filing. SpaceX's S-1, submitted to regulators the previous week, acknowledged that either party could exit the Anthropic agreement on 90 days' notice, but the document made no reference to the 180-day starting term Musk described in his posts, according to Reuters. At $1.25 billion per month, the ceiling on a six-month deal is roughly $7.5 billion — a fraction of the $45 billion that a 36-month contract would have represented, according to The Next Web.
According to the IPO filing, SpaceX's AI division generated $818 million in segment revenue during the first quarter of 2026 while posting an operating loss of roughly $2.5 billion. The company is targeting a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion in its public debut, according to TipRanks.
Separately, Musk indicated that the Anthropic arrangement is unlikely to be a one-off, writing on X that SpaceX is in talks with additional potential customers and envisions scaling its compute-for-hire business over time, eventually extending it to orbital data centers, according to Reuters. Requests for comment on the revised lease terms went unanswered by both companies, according to The Next Web.
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