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Elon Musk has described a major computing agreement between SpaceX and Anthropic as only “a 180-day lease,” appearing to contrast with statements in the rocket company’s IPO prospectus that the AI startup had committed to pay $1.25 billion a month through May 2029.
The discrepancy, first reported by the Financial Times, emerged days after SpaceX published the filing ahead of its planned stock market debut.
The total deal would have been worth $45 billion, which would go a long way offsetting the billions it has already spent on capital development for SpaceX’s AI division.
On Thursday Musk posted that the agreement was merely a “a 180 day lease with 90 day notice mutual cancellation”, adding that the short-term structure was “our request, not Anthropic’s” as the rocketry company may need the capacity back “if compute gets super tight”.
A person familiar with the contract’s terms told the FT that it has a minimum 180 day length, but is open-ended. In the post, Musk said that his company had not committed to leasing its Colossus computer for years, but “it’s possible that may be what happens”.
The $45 billion deal was a major focus in the company’s mammoth prospectus, where it said the deal “highlights the increasing performance of large-scale, frontier-level AI infrastructure”.
Musk’s post was made during SpaceX’s quiet period, a time from the filing of a prospectus until IPO in which companies are obliged to refrain from sharing any previously-undisclosed information that might affect the raise.
However, John Coates, a former acting director of the SEC’s corporate finance division and now a professor at Harvard Law School, told the FT he believed it was unlikely SEC regulators would take action.
The agency “shows no apparent interest in enforcing quiet periods, gun-jumping or any of the longstanding rules that have helped keep pump-and-dump schemes out of US capital markets,” he told the paper.
