SpaceX’s rapid push into AI infrastructure has taken an unexpected turn, as a flagship data center built to power its own Grok models is now a lucrative rental asset for rival AI firm Anthropic.

Building Colossus 1 at record speed

During its IPO roadshow, SpaceX highlighted that its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis was erected in just 122 days, framing speed as a major competitive advantage.¹ The facility was initially designed to be part of a three-campus supercluster for training Grok, SpaceX’s cutting-edge AI models, alongside two other data centers more than 10 miles away.²

Technical problems emerge

As SpaceX attempted to bring the Memphis site online for Grok, engineers encountered serious latency problems connecting Colossus 1 to the other campuses, issues reportedly compounded by aging network infrastructure.¹² The design also mixed multiple generations of Nvidia accelerators—older chips alongside newer Hopper and Blackwell systems—creating bottlenecks that slowed distributed training to near the pace of the slowest hardware.¹

These hardware and networking mismatches meant SpaceX “couldn’t make the data centre work for Grok,” according to one account.¹

Pivot to rentals and revenue

Facing underutilization, SpaceX opted to monetize Colossus 1 rather than continue struggling to integrate it into its own AI cluster. The company rented the Memphis facility to Anthropic, which is reportedly paying about $1.25 billion per month — around $15 billion a year — for access.¹² Alongside a separate $920 million‑per‑month deal with Google, SpaceX is now said to be generating roughly $2.17 billion in monthly compute revenue from infrastructure originally built for internal use.¹

Differing narratives and future plans

The revelations complicate SpaceX’s earlier narrative of Colossus 1 as a triumph of rapid construction, suggesting that speed came at the cost of uniform design and cluster performance.¹ At the same time, executives insist they have not abandoned internal AI ambitions, including Grok and longer-term plans for satellite-based AI servers, even as third parties like Anthropic benefit from facilities SpaceX’s own teams struggled to fully exploit.¹²