Collosus 1 is the world's most powerful supercomputer, a center consisting of over half a million processors, operated by Elon Musk's company SpaceX and located in Memphis, USA.
- Like SpaceX's previous contract with Anthropic, Google's need for computing power comes amid a massive increase in the use of artificial intelligence by companies and people.
- As more and more personalities and institutions urge caution, consumer attraction to AI continues to grow.
Space company SpaceX has struck a deal for computing power services ahead of its historic IPO, this time with Google. The deal was announced on Friday in a filing with regulatory authorities, Reuters and Tech Crunch report.
According to the agreement, Google will pay SpaceX $920 million per month from October 2026 to June 2029 for access to “approximately 110,000 NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs), processing units (CPUs), memory and other related components.”
Computing power from xAI
The deal is similar in length and scope to the one SpaceX announced with Anthropic in late May.
Under that deal, Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month through 2029 to lease all available computing capacity at the Colossus 1 data center, which xAI (Elon Musk's AI, which is part of SpaceX) originally built for its own AI projects.
SpaceX's Colossus 1, located in Memphis, Tennessee, is the largest supercomputer and data center dedicated to AI. It is equipped with over 220,000 Nvidia processors.
The deal with Google covers about half of the computing capacity that Anthropic has access to within Colossus 1.
SpaceX did not specify which data center Google will use. Chief executive Elon Musk previously hinted that his company would reserve the Colossus 2 data center for xAI.
Prior to the SpaceX deal, Anthropic's computing power was significantly limited. Google is in a very different situation, with some estimates pointing to it as the single largest holder of AI computing capacity in the world.
A Google representative described the deal in a statement as the result of unexpectedly high demand for Google's AI-based products.
