A few months ago, Elon Musk accused the AI company Anthropic of stealing artificial intelligence training data “on a large scale” in a post on social media platform X.
That obviously didn’t stop the billionaire from doing business with the company. Musk’s SpaceX has signed a data center deal that will give Anthropic access to the power of more than 200,000 Nvidia GPUs at its Colossus 1 supercomputer facility in Tennessee.
The partnership will provide additional Anthropic firepower to “directly improve the capacity of the Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers,” SpaceX said in a website post. “As part of this agreement, Anthropic has also expressed interest in collaborating to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”
As a result of this agreement, Anthropic said in its post, the company is increasing the usage limits for users of all its products. The changes, effective immediately, double Claude Code rate limits for Claude users on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans based on the chair, remove peak hour limits for Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts and increase API limits for Claude Opus models.
More AI means more data center deals
In the same post, Anthropic listed some of its data center agreements with companies, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft, and reiterated its intention to continue expanding internationally. Amid the data center downturn, Anthropic also announced in February that it is committed to covering the cost of energy price increases driven by data center activity. Critics have done so he asked how companies like Anthropic can keep those promises.
The deal with SpaceX, which acquired Musk’s AI company xAI earlier this year, it may have come as a surprise to some, but AI companies are scrambling to protect data center resources as they continue to develop data-hungry artificial intelligence models.
At the same time, some communities are like that retreating in the construction of a new data center, leading others in the industry, Musk in particular, to plan building data centers in space.
Among the groups criticizing the deal is the NAACP, which said in a statement about SpaceX, “Any company that ignores the obvious concern for the environment and the health of Black communities that is supposed to power a future that will help us all sends a clear message about who it intends to serve in the future… desires and health.”
The agency pointed to a lawsuit filed by SpaceX over environmental concerns at its Colossus 1 computer center.
Companies’ AI infrastructure is ‘mission critical’
It’s hard to gauge what Elon Musk will do next, but his decision to partner with Anthropic seems to make sense as the AI giants consolidate partnerships and as SpaceX tries to ramp up its data business quickly before the summer. first public offering. Public beef may not matter when billions are at stake, and Anthropic may need SpaceX hardware as much as SpaceX needs Anthropic’s business.
“Protecting data center resources is becoming a key goal for all major AI players,” Lu Zhang, co-founder and managing partner at Fusion Fund, told CNET. “The bottleneck is no longer just a skill model, but access to computing, power, and physical infrastructure.”
SpaceX, Zhang said, is different from other data center service companies because it has access to large capital, established partnerships in the energy industry, and is moving quickly, in addition to having its own AI business.
Zhang, who specializes in AI business trends, said large AI companies risk deployment bottlenecks and high costs if they don’t secure their long-term infrastructure now.
In the long run, digital access may be as important as the models themselves,” he said.
