Anthropic taps SpaceX's Colossus Supercomputer to solve Claude compute crunch

Anthropic has entered into a strategic agreement with SpaceX to utilize 300 megawatts of compute capacity at the Colossus 1 data center

Early this year, SpaceX acquired xAI, bringing Musk’s frontier AI effort under the same roof as his space and satellite operations. Last year, xAI built the Colossus 1 data center with 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators. Today, Anthropic signed an agreement with SpaceX to use all of the 300 megawatts of compute capacity at Colossus 1.

Same here.

By way of background for those who care, I spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity and was impressed.

Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2026

Due to the unprecedented growth of Claude Code, Anthropic has been struggling to meet the demands of users due to compute constraints. To solve this compute shortage problem, this year, Anthropic signed a deal for up to 5 gigawatts (GW) with Amazon, which includes nearly 1 GW of new capacity by the end of 2026. They also signed a 5 GW agreement with Google and Broadcom, which will begin coming online in 2027. Finally, they signed a deal with Microsoft and NVIDIA to make use of $30 billion of Azure capacity.

Anthropic mentioned that this new additional compute from SpaceX will be used directly to improve capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers. As part of the new agreement, Anthropic has also expressed interest in partnering with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity. Orbital AI compute is still in its nascent stages, so it remains to be seen how this interest will play out in the coming years.

Here is what the SpaceX team wrote on the orbital AI compute possibilities:

The compute required to train and operate the next generation of these systems is outpacing what terrestrial power, land, and cooling can deliver on the timelines that matter. SpaceX is the only organization with the launch cadence, mass-to-orbit economics, and constellation operations experience to make orbital compute a near-term engineering program rather than a research concept. If engineering challenges can be overcome, space-based compute offers near-limitless sustainable power with less impact on Earth.

Based on the feedback from developers, Anthropic today also announced that it is doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans. It is also removing the peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts. Finally, they are significantly increasing the API rate limits for Claude Opus models.