Piousbox

By Sebatsian Moss of Data Center Dynamics

SpaceX's xAI subsidiary is looking to score more data center compute lease deals, after it sold all of the capacity of Colossus I to Anthropic.

That deal will see Grok's competitor pay $1.25 billion a month over the next three years for the 300MW facility. The deal can be terminated by either party, with 90 days' notice.

"As the recently expanded partnership with Anthropic demonstrates, SpaceX is offering AI compute as a service at significant scale," CEO Elon Musk said.

"We are in discussions with other companies to do the same. "Over time, especially with orbital data centers, we expect to serve AI at extremely high scale."

In April, AI code editing startup Cursor announced that it would also be using space at xAI data centers - although SpaceX is set to acquire the business within 30 days of its IPO.

SpaceX is expected to go public on June 12, with the company looking to raise upwards of $75 billion. IPO documents reveal that xAI spent $12.7bn on AI infrastructure in 2025, and has already invested $7.7bn in the first quarter of 2026.

Alongside the first Colossus data center, xAI is developing Colossus 2. It acquired the land last March, and the data center came online in January. Despite Musk claiming it offered 1GW of capacity at launch, satellite imagery taken in January reportedly showed it had cooling equipment installed capable of managing 350MW.

The IPO document makes multiple mentions of the 1GW of data center capacity at SpaceX’s disposal, but describes it as “nameplate compute draw.” It explains this is calculated by taking “the number of GPUs installed in our data centers at the end of the period multiplied by their respective all-in power draw.

According to a chart in the IPO filing, the company’s nameplate compute draw was 1GW in March 2026, up from 300MW a year before. However, it also notes that this figure “reflects installed capacity and does not represent actual power consumption or utilization.” So while the GPUs are installed, they may not yet be powered up, suggesting the company’s actual useful compute power could be significantly less than 1GW.

How much capacity at the xAI data centers is actually reserved for Grok, the company's own generative AI effort, is unclear. The platform has seen dwindling usage, while increasing numbers of staff have left the company - including all non-Musk co-founders.

SpaceX, meanwhile, plans to launch up to one million space data center satellites in the years to come.