Colossus for rent

Elon Musk’s SpaceX (which now owns Elon Musk’s xAI) is leasing out its enormous data centre “Colossus” (300 MW of compute) to one of its fiercest competitors: Anthropic. Musk has, for example, spent a fair amount of time on social media personally criticising Anthropic’s CEO. A good example of how hard it is to predict the future, yet it makes sense for both: SpaceX has plenty of idle compute because few people use its AI, Grok, and Anthropic’s Claude is so popular that they have far more customers than compute.

In my view, though, another piece of news is just as important: Anthropic is also joining SpaceX’s project to build enormous data centres in space. Musk has talked about this for a while without perhaps being taken entirely seriously. Clearly more people do now.