Anthropic, maker of a suite of AI tools under the Claude banner, will lease over 300 megawatts of capacity from Elon Musk-owned SpaceX in an agreement announced on Wednesday.
Under the terms of the deal, Anthropic will gain access to all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Memphis-based Colossus 1 datacentre. The site houses over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, which Anthropic said will grant it more than 300 megawatts of new capacity within the month.
This capacity will be used to raise rate limits Anthropic has imposed to handle the large demand for Claude. It is doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise Plans, removing the peak hours limit reduction for pro and max accounts and increasing API rate limits for Claude Opus models. This means models will be able to handle more complex requests more quickly.
As part of its agreement with SpaceX, Anthropic said it has also expressed interest in partnering with the company to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity, a key goal of Elon Musk.
In January, he filed for permission to launch one million data centre satellites into Earth’s orbit. The application claims they are the most cost and energy efficient way to meet the growing demand for AI compute.
Anthropic also announced that it intends to expand its capacity internationally to support regulated industries’ need for in-region infrastructure. It added that it will only add capacity in “democratic countries whose legal and regulatory frameworks support investments of this scale”.
This is the latest in a series of large announcements made by the company this month, including the formation of an AI services company in partnership with financial institutions and the launch of new AI agents targeting the financial sector.
