SpaceX‘s IPO prospectus, filed with the SEC on May 20, contained a disclosure that answers one of the more pressing questions raised by the filing: how the company plans to offset the $2.469 billion quarterly operating loss generated by its AI segment.
The answer, at least in part, is Anthropic.
The S-1 details a compute services agreement under which Anthropic will pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with reduced fees in May and June 2026 as capacity ramps up. If the contract runs its full term, it would generate nearly $45 billion for SpaceX, Bloomberg reported. An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the monthly figure to Business Insider.
Anthropic gets full access to the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee — a facility housing more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, including H100, H200, and GB200 accelerators — while SpaceX’s AI segment shifts training workloads to the newer Colossus 2.
Anthropic co-founder and chief compute officer Tom Brown announced on X that the company will also scale GB200 capacity on Colossus 2 throughout June. The compute will go primarily toward inference workloads for Claude subscribers.
In the prospectus, SpaceX said the deal is an opportunity to “monetize unused compute capacity in our infrastructure,” and said it expects to “enter into additional similar services contracts.” Either party can exit with 90 days’ notice.
At $1.25 billion per month — roughly $15 billion annually — the contract offers meaningful relief against the AI segment’s burn rate. The segment posted $818 million in Q1 revenue against a $2.469 billion operating loss, a quarterly shortfall that alone exceeded SpaceX’s entire 2025 operating loss of $2.589 billion.
Read: SpaceX Files For IPO, xAI Losses Loom Large
For Anthropic, the deal is a deliberate infrastructure strategy. TechCrunch reported that the company’s compute demand has consistently outpaced its available capacity, and Axios noted that its annualized revenue has climbed sharply enough to sustain a contract of this scale. Leasing Colossus 1 at $15 billion a year appears to be the faster path than building equivalent capacity independently.
The prospectus signals SpaceX intends to sign more deals like it. Two companies that compete directly in the AI model market — SpaceX’s AI segment with Grok, Anthropic with Claude — have found it commercially rational to share infrastructure, and SpaceX is positioning that arrangement as a repeatable revenue stream ahead of its Nasdaq listing under the ticker SPCX, with a roadshow scheduled to begin around June 5.
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