A $1.25 billion monthly cloud contract revealed in SpaceX’s IPO filing positions Elon Musk’s space venture as a formidable new force in the AI data center market.
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SpaceX to net $45 billion from Anthropic in new cloud deal
SpaceX is set to receive $1.25 billion per month from artificial intelligence firm Anthropic in a massive cloud services deal running through May 2029, a contract valued at $45 billion that challenges the dominance of Amazon and Google in AI infrastructure. The agreement, detailed in SpaceX’s S-1 filing on Wednesday, confirms the immense capital required to compete at the frontier of AI.
"The next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative," Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who recently joined Anthropic, said on X.
Under the terms, Anthropic will pay the full $1.25 billion monthly fee after a reduced-rate ramp-up period in May and June 2026. The deal provides Anthropic with critical computing capacity to support its Claude family of models, whose annualized revenue run rate surged to over $30 billion in April from $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to Counterpoint Research.
For SpaceX, the deal provides a huge, stable revenue stream outside of its volatile launch business ahead of its blockbuster IPO. It immediately establishes the company as a major cloud infrastructure provider, leveraging its resources to compete with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, which are also Anthropic’s primary backers.
A New Contender in the Cloud Wars
The Anthropic contract single-handedly creates a new multi-billion dollar business for SpaceX, which reported revenue of $18.67 billion in 2025 with an operating loss of $2.59 billion. The deal’s $15 billion annualized run rate rivals the scale of many established cloud players and validates the company’s massive investment in infrastructure, which now includes the AI and social media division xAI following a merger completed in February 2026.
This move pits SpaceX directly against the giants that have funded Anthropic’s rise. Amazon and Google have committed a combined $70 billion in capital and cloud credits to the AI firm. Amazon has deployed $13 billion for an equity stake, while Google’s parent Alphabet holds a 14% stake. Now, a significant portion of their investment will flow directly to a new and formidable competitor in the cloud space.
AI’s Insatiable Demand for Power
The scale of the contract underscores the astronomical costs of developing and training frontier AI models. Anthropic, which led the global LLM market with a 31.4% revenue share in the first quarter, according to Counterpoint Research, is securing a three-year pipeline of computing power to stay ahead of rivals like OpenAI. The company projects it will reach profitability by 2028, two years ahead of OpenAI’s own target.
The AI infrastructure boom has attracted major financial players, with Blackstone recently launching a $5 billion joint venture with Google for AI cloud services. The SpaceX-Anthropic agreement, however, represents a new level of vertical integration and spending, signaling that the primary players are willing to spend tens of billions annually just to secure the raw computing power needed to compete. The deal is a strong positive signal for hardware suppliers like Nvidia, whose GPUs are essential for AI data centers.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
