HAWTHORNE, Calif. — A weekend exchange between Elon Musk and investor Chamath Palihapitiya has put a spotlight on one of the most lucrative contracts in SpaceX's fast-growing artificial-intelligence business — and, in Musk's telling, on just how much leverage the company holds.
The back-and-forth began when Palihapitiya argued on the All-In podcast that SpaceX's multibillion-dollar compute agreement with Anthropic contains a quiet piece of optionality: either side can walk away on 90 days' notice. If demand for data-center capacity keeps outstripping supply, he suggested, SpaceX could reprice the deal to two or three times its current value — what he called "the kingmaking move."
Musk did not disagree. Responding on X on Sunday, he noted that the flexibility runs in both directions. "It works both ways, of course," he wrote, adding that there would be "no crying in the casino for either party." Investors read it as confirmation that SpaceX sees its compute arm as a seller's market, a view that sits comfortably alongside the company's push toward a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate.
A contract built for an AI boom
The numbers behind the exchange are striking. According to SpaceX's IPO filings from the spring, Anthropic agreed to pay roughly $1.25 billion a month for dedicated capacity at the company's Colossus supercomputer complex through May 2029 — a commitment approaching $45 billion in total. Both parties kept the right to exit with 90 days' notice, a clause that looked conservative at signing and now looks like built-in pricing power.
That power exists because SpaceX can build faster than almost anyone else. Since folding xAI and Colossus into its infrastructure machine, the company has leaned into an appetite for training compute that only keeps intensifying, an argument Musk has made as he reframes the business around orbital-scale compute.
