Remember when Elon Musk announced that he would be leasing the available computing power at SpaceX/xAI’s massive Colossus data center to Anthropic? Turns out Anthropic’s time at the Memphis data center might be more of a temporary hotel stay than a stable long-term lease. According to Musk, the agreement with Anthropic is only a 180-day lease. In a post on X, Musk responded to a user suggesting that his company’s agreement with Anthropic was locked in for three years by explaining, “SpaceX has not committed to leasing Colossus for years, although it’s possible that may be what happens. This is a 180 day lease with 90 day notice mutual cancellation thereafter.”
This is a surprisingly quick turnaround, given that Anthropic urgently needs to scale up to meet its growing demand, while Musk is in dire need of revenue on his books as SpaceX heads toward a massive initial public offering (IPO). According to Musk, “The short term was our request, not Anthropic’s.” This could be an effort to treat the agreement as a proof of concept to show investors that renting out building-scale compute is a highly viable business model.
Alternatively, it could be a move to generate hype and project the image that SpaceX will imminently need those chips back for its own in-house AI initiatives. That aligns with Musk’s statement: “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.”
However, Musk’s account of the deal doesn't quite match SpaceX’s S-1 filing with the SEC. According to the document, Anthropic “has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee.” While the document does reflect the mutual 90-day termination clause, the overall text suggests a three-year baseline lock-in. Gizmodo has reached out to Anthropic for clarification on this lease agreement.
Something may have shifted between the filing date and now. SpaceX has been aggressively securing revenue agreements ahead of its public debut, likely to justify what is expected to be one of the largest IPOs in financial history.
[AgentUpdate Depth Analysis] Compute remains the ultimate bottleneck for the progression of highly autonomous AI Agents. Musk's potential reclaiming of Anthropic's lease underscores the volatility of the underlying hardware supply chain in the LLM era. As Anthropic pushes the envelope in agentic workflows—such as Claude's "Computer Use" capability—sustained and uninterrupted compute is critical. Compared to OpenAI's deep alliance with Microsoft's Azure infrastructure, Anthropic's "nomadic" compute strategy highlights a major systemic vulnerability. For the broader AI Agent ecosystem, this serves as a critical warning: the next phase of agentic supremacy will not just be won by superior software architecture, but by securing robust, sovereign hardware partnerships that can guarantee long-term operational stability.
