xAI-Anthropic deal could boost SpaceX ahead of possible IPO

Anthropic’s new access to xAI’s Colossus 1 data center gives the Claude maker a flood of compute, but the bigger winner may be SpaceX. The deal, announced on May 6, gave Anthropic access to all of the capacity at the Memphis, Tennessee site, which coverage has put at more than 300 megawatts and over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. Anthropic said the extra power would let it raise usage limits for Claude products, including Claude Code and the Claude API.

That makes the transaction look like a straightforward infrastructure win for Anthropic, which has been scrambling to keep up with surging demand. But the politics of the arrangement matter just as much as the hardware. Elon Musk spent years attacking Anthropic, and in February he wrote on X that the company “hates Western civilization.” The new partnership between two Musk-linked rivals has the feel of a détente, yet it also reads like a business decision shaped by scarcity, not friendship: Anthropic gets scarce compute, while Musk gets a marquee customer for an asset that can be presented as a high-value commercial platform.

SpaceX has a separate reason to welcome the optics. On February 2, SpaceX announced it had acquired xAI in a $1.25 trillion deal, a merger Musk said was meant to support space-based and orbital data centers. Folding xAI into SpaceX turned the combined company into the world’s most valuable private company, according to multiple reports, and the Anthropic deal fits neatly into that pitch. It suggests xAI is not only a model company, but a compute landlord with a business line that can throw off revenue and help justify the valuation story around Musk’s expanding corporate empire, including any eventual SpaceX public offering.

That valuation narrative is exactly why some industry watchers remain skeptical. A deal like this can signal real demand, but it can also serve a public-relations function, showing that Musk’s companies are monetizing infrastructure rather than merely burning capital. For SpaceX, having Anthropic as a customer creates the appearance of diversified, enterprise-grade demand at the very moment investors are being asked to think about a possible IPO and the long-term economics of orbital compute.

The Memphis buildout also carries a much rougher backdrop. Community activists protested outside Colossus 1 on May 5, and the NAACP has sued xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations tied to gas turbines powering its Memphis-area operations. The group recently sought a preliminary injunction to stop what it calls unpermitted air pollution from a Southaven, Mississippi power plant linked to Colossus 2. That leaves the Anthropic deal carrying two messages at once: a bullish signal for Musk’s compute business, and a reminder that the same expansion has already triggered environmental backlash in Tennessee and Mississippi.