Anthropic strikes compute deal with SpaceX as demand for Claude surges

Anthropic struck a deal to use the full computing power of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, a pact that underscored how scarce AI infrastructure is redrawing the industry’s alliances. The site houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors, and Anthropic said the arrangement would add 300 megawatts of new capacity for the Claude maker within a month.

The agreement gave the IPO-bound SpaceX a marquee customer while helping Anthropic ease a capacity squeeze driven by surging demand for products such as Claude Code, its AI coding tool. It also marked a sharp shift in posture between two companies that have often looked more like competitors than collaborators, with compute, not personality, driving the new alignment. In practical terms, the deal showed where leverage now sits in AI: with whoever controls chips, power and large-scale data-center capacity.

The announcement came as Anthropic held a developer day in San Francisco and introduced a new Claude feature called dreaming. The company said the feature was designed to help its systems learn by reviewing work between sessions, spotting patterns and updating files that store user preferences and context. Anthropic also said it would double Claude Code rate limits for paid plans, remove peak-hour caps for Pro and Max accounts, and sharply increase the volume of requests developers can make to Claude Opus models.

Anthropic’s interest in SpaceX went beyond immediate capacity. The company said it wanted to work with SpaceX on multiple gigawatts of space-based orbital data centers, a concept that fits Elon Musk’s long-running push to move computation off Earth and build infrastructure for a much larger AI future. Musk said he made the decision after spending time with Anthropic leaders and that their work to make Claude good for humanity impressed him.

The deal captured a broader pattern now taking hold across the AI sector. As models grow more power-hungry and demand keeps climbing, even firms with competing products are being pulled into the same supply chain. The companies that can secure chips, electricity and massive data-center footprints are becoming the gatekeepers of the next phase of AI growth.