Anthropic says rapid growth is straining compute, signs SpaceX data center deal

Anthropic’s explosive growth is now colliding with a harder problem than demand: the power and chips needed to keep its AI running. Chief executive Dario Amodei said the company had planned for about 10-fold growth this year, but was instead seeing 80-fold growth in revenue and usage on an annualized basis in the first quarter, a pace that has pushed compute to the center of its expansion strategy.

Amodei made the remarks Wednesday at Anthropic’s Code with Claude developer conference in San Francisco, saying the company was struggling to keep up with demand for compute and was working as quickly as possible to add more capacity. He said Anthropic would pass that capacity on to users as soon as possible. The company has already said demand for Claude created “inevitable strain on our infrastructure,” with reliability and performance affected during peak hours.

That strain has come as Claude Code has gained strong traction with software engineers, helping drive Anthropic’s rise. The company said it was in talks with investors about raising money at a $900 billion valuation, a figure that would put it above OpenAI and underscore how quickly capital is chasing the AI boom. For Anthropic, the immediate constraint is not just demand for users, but the physical backbone needed to serve them.

Hours after Amodei’s comments, Anthropic announced a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at Colossus 1, SpaceX’s Memphis, Tennessee data center. The arrangement gives Anthropic access to more than 300 megawatts of compute capacity and is expected to directly improve service for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers. Anthropic also said it was interested in working with SpaceX on multiple gigawatts of compute capacity in space, a sign of how far the infrastructure arms race is stretching beyond conventional data centers.

The deal adds to Anthropic’s already large buildout efforts, including a multibillion-dollar compute agreement with Amazon. It also arrives against a more complicated backdrop for the company: in March 2026, the Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk and blacklisted it from military work. That tension with the U.S. government sits alongside a commercial surge that is forcing the industry to confront a basic question. The AI race is no longer only about model quality or product adoption. It is increasingly about who can secure enough power, land, chips and financing to feed it.