Just a few months ago, Elon Musk accused the AI company Anthropic of stealing artificial intelligence training data “at massive scale” in a post on his social network X.
That apparently hasn’t stopped the billionaire from doing business with the company. Musk’s SpaceX has signed a data center deal that will give Anthropic access to more than 200,000 Nvidia GPUs worth of power at its Colossus 1 supercomputer facility in Tennessee.
The partnership will give Anthropic additional firepower to “directly improve capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers,” SpaceX said in a website post. “As part of this agreement, Anthropic also expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”
Because of this deal, Anthropic said in its own post, the company is raising usage limits for users across some of its products. The changes, effective immediately, double Claude Code rate limits for users of Claude on Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans, remove peak-hour restrictions of Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts and raise API limits for Claude Opus models.
More AI means more data center deals
In the same post, Anthropic listed some of its other data center agreements with companies, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft, and reiterated its intention to keep expanding internationally. In the era of data center backlashes, Anthropic also announced in February that it has pledged to cover the costs of energy price increases driven by data center activity. Critics have questioned how companies such as Anthropic can uphold those pledges.
The deal with SpaceX, which acquired Musk’s AI company xAI earlier this year, may have surprised some, but AI companies are scrambling to secure data center resources as they continue to develop increasingly data-hungry artificial intelligence models.
At the same time, some communities are pushing back on new data center construction, leading some in the industry, Musk in particular, to plan to build data centers in space.
Among the groups criticizing the deal is the NAACP, which said in a statement about SpaceX, “Any company that disregards the obvious environmental and health concerns of Black communities to supposedly power a future that will help us all is sending a clear message about who it intends to serve in that future… Anthropic’s use of a data center that pollutes a historically Black community is, at best, an uninformed decision, and at worst, a total disregard for the community’s wishes and health.”
The organization pointed to a lawsuit it has filed against SpaceX over environmental concerns at its Colossus 1 computing center.
