Anthropic will pay xAI $1.25 billion every month

Financial details of the new infrastructure agreement between Anthropic and xAI have been revealed. It was previously announced that Anthropic purchased the 300 megawatt processing capacity of the Colossus 1 data center located near Memphis, Tennessee. Now, the information in the S-1 file submitted by SpaceX to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has revealed the economic dimension of this agreement. Accordingly, Anthropic will pay $1.25 billion monthly to xAI until May 2029. For the first two months, a discounted price will be applied due to the process of fully commissioning the data center capacity.

It is stated that the total size of the agreement may exceed 40 billion dollars. In the statement made by SpaceX, it was stated that this cooperation enables the utilization of unused processing capacity in the existing infrastructure to generate income. In addition, the contract includes a clause that both parties can terminate the agreement by giving 90 days’ notice. The company also noted that similar service agreements are expected to be made in the future.

While artificial intelligence companies have recently turned to larger data center investments, processing capacity has now become one of the strategic resources in the sector. The high GPU capacity required especially for training and running large language models forces technology companies to invest billions of dollars in infrastructure. Despite this, some companies experience fluctuations in capacity usage, resulting in the emergence of new revenue models.

xAI opens its data center capacity to different companies

It seems that xAI has moved to a hybrid position in the industry with this agreement. Because most of the companies in the field of artificial intelligence either only establish their own infrastructure or operate only as cloud providers serving others. xAI becomes one of the companies that implement both models at the same time. This approach, called “neocloud” in the industry, allows companies to balance their investment costs by renting excess processing capacity to other companies.

In the evaluation made by SpaceX, it was stated that the two-way revenue model offers more than one way to provide returns on investments. However, industry sources think that there is a different picture behind this development. It is stated that there has been a significant decrease in the usage rates of the artificial intelligence assistant named Grok, especially developed by xAI, in recent months. This situation may have caused a significant portion of the company’s server capacity to remain empty.

In addition, the scale of the Colossus 1 data center also attracts attention. Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence initiative xAI put this facility into operation in a short time and became one of the fastest growing companies in the sector. It is known that tens of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs are used in the data center. However, factors such as high energy consumption, operation costs and capacity utilization rates raise questions about the sustainability of such investments.

On the Anthropic front, the main purpose of the agreement is considered to be to secure long-term processing capacity for the development of artificial intelligence models, especially the Claude family. Considering that competitors such as OpenAI, Google and Meta have similarly increased their data center investments, it seems that the companies are in intense competition not only in the field of model development but also on the infrastructure side. This table shows that data center partnerships and capacity rental agreements may come to the fore more frequently in the artificial intelligence industry in the coming period.