Anthropic Leases SpaceXAI's 300MW Memphis Data Center for AI Compute

Anthropic has leased the full 300-megawatt capacity of SpaceXAI’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, securing approximately 220,000 Nvidia GPUs in one of the largest single-tenant cloud compute transactions the AI sector has seen.

The lease, disclosed Thursday, gives the San Francisco-based developer of the Claude family of large language models a dedicated computing facility as it competes with OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Elon Musk’s own xAI for the hardware needed to train and serve frontier models.

Musk acknowledged the deal in characteristically sardonic fashion on X. “No one set off my evil detector,” he wrote in response to a user who asked about the lease, a nod to Anthropic’s founding story. The company was spun out of OpenAI in 2021 by researchers Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, who cited AI safety concerns as their reason for leaving.

Anthropic’s decision to lease from Musk, whose xAI is a direct competitor, highlights the degree to which compute scarcity is reshaping allegiances in the AI industry.

Colossus 1 occupies the site of a former Electrolux factory in southwest Memphis. The facility, owned and operated by SpaceXAI, functions as a GPU-as-a-service operation. The 220,000 Nvidia GPUs housed there represent a significant share of the total H100 and B200 chips Nvidia has shipped to cloud providers in the past two years.

The xAI dynamic

The deal sharpens the contrast between SpaceXAI’s infrastructure play and xAI’s consumer-AI ambitions. Musk’s xAI was valued at $230 billion in a January funding round, making it the second most valuable AI startup globally behind OpenAI. Yet SpaceXAI, a separate entity, is now generating revenue by supplying compute to a direct rival of xAI.

The arrangement echoes the business model of CoreWeave, the GPU cloud provider valued at roughly $80 billion that has built its business supplying neutral compute to AI companies that do not want to depend on their hyperscaler competitors.

Infrastructure boom

The broader AI infrastructure market is expanding at an extraordinary pace. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have each committed between $40 billion and $80 billion in AI data center spending for 2026. Standalone GPU cloud providers including CoreWeave, Lambda, and Voltage Park are positioning themselves as neutral compute suppliers for companies that see Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and AWS as both vendor and competitor.

The Memphis deal is the latest in a string of large AI infrastructure transactions. In March, Oracle signed a $12 billion GPU lease with xAI for its Abilene, Texas data center. CoreWeave has raised $10 billion in debt and equity financing since January to fund its own expansion.

Anthropic did not disclose the financial terms of the Colossus 1 lease. Neither SpaceXAI nor Anthropic responded to requests for comment on Thursday.