SpaceX rented $6.3B of compute to an open-source AI lab
SpaceX keeps quietly becoming a hyperscaler. The latest: it signed a compute deal with Reflection AI worth up to $6.3 billion. Reflection will pay $150 million a month starting July 1, getting immediate access to Nvidia's newest GB300 chips inside SpaceX's Colossus 2 data center near Memphis. The contract runs through 2029, with a 90-day exit either side after the first three months.
Put it on the board with the others: Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25 billion a month, Google $920 million, Cursor took a $60 billion option, and now Reflection. The rockets company has turned Colossus, originally built to train xAI's models, into a commercial compute landlord that the biggest names in AI are renting from. That's a remarkable second act for an aerospace business heading toward an IPO.
The detail that matters most is who Reflection is: an open-source AI lab, Nvidia-backed, focused on open models. That's a strategically different customer than Anthropic or Google. It lands at the exact moment governments and enterprises are getting nervous about depending on closed, foreign-controlled AI, and the open-weights frontier, increasingly Chinese with GLM, Kimi, and DeepSeek, now has a serious American compute backer pumping GB300s into it. The question worth sitting with: when your power and your chips both come from Elon Musk's infrastructure, how open is open. techcrunch.com
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Put it on the board with the others: Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25 billion a month, Google $920 million, Cursor took a $60 billion option, and now Reflection. The rockets company has turned Colossus, originally built to train xAI's models, into a commercial compute landlord that the biggest names in AI are renting from. That's a remarkable second act for an aerospace business heading toward an IPO.
The detail that matters most is who Reflection is: an open-source AI lab, Nvidia-backed, focused on open models. That's a strategically different customer than Anthropic or Google. It lands at the exact moment governments and enterprises are getting nervous about depending on closed, foreign-controlled AI, and the open-weights frontier, increasingly Chinese with GLM, Kimi, and DeepSeek, now has a serious American compute backer pumping GB300s into it. The question worth sitting with: when your power and your chips both come from Elon Musk's infrastructure, how open is open. techcrunch.com
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