SpaceX IPO Filing Reveals Anthropic Is Paying $15 Billion a Year to Access Its Data Centers

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. Paresh DaveMaxwell ZeffBusinessMay 20, 2026 5:43 PMSpaceX IPO Filing Reveals Anthropic Is Paying $15 Billion a Year to Access Its Data CentersThe long-awaited documents SpaceX filed with US regulators Wednesday included details about a lucrative deal to lend GPUs to a major AI rival. Photograph: AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/Getty Images Save this story Save this storyAnthropic has agreed to pay SpaceX $1. 25 billion per month through May of 2029 for access to cloud computing infrastructure, a long-awaited US regulatory filing revealed on Wednesday.

In other words, Anthropic will be sending a rival artificial intelligence lab roughly $15 billion a year, an extraordinary sum that demonstrates how access to compute has become one of the defining bottlenecks in the race to develop advanced artificial intelligence. Anthropic and SpaceX announced a deal earlier this month that gives the Claude developer access to GPUs at Colossus and Colossus II, a pair of data centers straddling Tennessee and Mississippi with more than one gigawatt of computing power. SpaceX had rushed to build the facilities for its xAI unit, which develops the Grok AI chatbot, but Musk said his company didn’t need all of their computing capacity in the end.

Technical Details

Terms of the deal had not been previously disclosed. Anthropic is paying an unspecified reduced fee for May and June before the $1. 25 billion per month rate takes effect, SpaceX said in its S-1 regulatory filing.

The eye-popping figure is a sign of how hungry Anthropic is for computing resources needed to power products like its increasingly popular AI coding tools. The company’s revenue for the second quarter of 2026 is expected to exceed $10 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the figures to WIRED.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment. Are you a current or former SpaceX or Anthropic employee who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you.

Industry Implications

Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporters securely on Signal at Peard33. SpaceX says it expects to “enter into additional similar services contracts” around its compute infrastructure and will continue using its data centers for itself. “We have sufficient capacity to provide compute for our own AI models, including support of our training and inference demands, and to satisfy the obligations under these agreements,” the filing states.

“We believe our dual monetization strategy provides multiple pathways to generate returns on invested capital. ”The filing details SpaceX’s business opportunities and risks ahead of an initial public offering. SpaceX is pursuing the largest IPO in history, with hopes of raising about $75 billion at a valuation of $1.

The company filed its initial paperwork confidentially with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on April 1, allowing time to make edits based on feedback from the regulator.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.