Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, during the company’s Builder Summit in Bangalore, India, Monday, February 16, 2026.
Samyukta Lakshmi | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Anthropic Wednesday announcement a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use the full computing capacity of his company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee.
As part of the deal, Anthropic will have access to more than 300 megawatts of computing capacity and has also “expressed interest” in working with SpaceX to develop several gigawatts of computing capacity in space. Anthropic said the deal would directly improve capacity for its Claude Pro and Claude Max paid subscribers.
The deal comes after Musk, who merged SpaceX with his rival AI startup xAI this year, repeatedly criticized Anthropic over its conflict with the US government. Musk said Anthropic was “doomed to become the opposite of its name,” which would be misanthropic, and asked if there was a “more hypocritical company than Anthropic.”
“Anthropism hates Western civilization,” Musk wrote in February.
But on Wednesday, Musk changed his tune. He said in an article on that he spent a lot of time with senior members of the Anthropic team over the past week and was “impressed.”
“Everyone I met was very knowledgeable and committed to doing the right thing. No one set off my evil detector,” Musk wrote. “As long as they engage in critical self-examination, Claude will probably be fine.”
Musk also spent much of last week in federal court in Oakland, California, where he testified for three days at the trial within its trial against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman.
Read more CNBC tech newsXAI has been building out its data infrastructure, primarily around Memphis, as it struggles to compete in the booming AI market with OpenAI, Google and anthropogenic. Colossus 1 is its largest installation to date.
During the construction and operation of Colossus, xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech, LLC, installed and operated dozens of natural gas turbines to power the facility, claiming that no federal permits were required to do so because they were intended for temporary use only. The turbines reportedly worsened air pollution problems around Memphis and led to persistent protests against xAI’s work in the region.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of executives and researchers who left OpenAI. The company is best known for developing a family of AI models called Claude, and it is currently in talks with investors to raise funding worth $900 billion, as reported by CNBC. previously reported.
Last month, Anthropic said demand for Claude had led to “unavoidable strain on our infrastructure”, which impacted the “reliability and performance” of its users, particularly during peak hours. The company has been working to increase its capacity in recent weeks by signing several infrastructure contracts, including one multi-billion dollar deal with Amazon.
Anthropic’s IT deals also come after a few months of contentious negotiations with the U.S. government.
In March, the Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, blacklisting it from collaborations with the US military, after the two sides failed to reach an agreement on how the company’s models could be used. Anthropic sued the Trump administration in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. to try to overturn the Pentagon’s actions, and that litigation is still ongoing.
Meanwhile, the Department of Defense has adopted xAI’s Grok model, along with offerings from other AI companies.
–CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report
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