GoKawiilLast week, Anthropic announced that it had struck a deal with SpaceX to lease all of the latter's Colossus 1 data center, with over 220,000 GPUs and 300 megawatts of compute capacity. The deal immediately raises questions, foremost among them: why would Musk lease one of xAI’s most aggressively hyped AI assets to a direct rival? With SpaceX's IPO just around the corner, a related strategy appears to be at play, but it also turns out that the system's mixed architecture with different types of GPUs may be a key reason Musk has decided to lease the system.
Anthropic says the newly acquired capacity will primarily be used to ease long-standing usage bottlenecks across Claude’s paid ecosystem. According to the company, the additional compute will enable significantly higher Claude Code limits, the removal of peak-hour throttling for Pro and Max subscribers, and substantially increased API request limits for Claude Opus models used by developers and enterprise customers.
The seemingly unlikely partnership — a complete turnaround of Musk's earlier stance on Anthropic — also reveals Anthropic is straining under the Claude ecosystem’s compute demands. The company says it needs the entire 300 MW AI supercluster just to improve the experience of using Claude.
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Anthropic appears to have hit the compute wall
The earliest signs that Anthropic was struggling to keep up with the computing demands of its growing user base were the increasingly aggressive usage limits placed across Claude’s services. Free users frequently complained about rapidly exhausting tokens — the units Claude assigns for processing tasks. However, the restrictions extended beyond the free tier. Paid Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users also regularly encountered message caps, peak-hour throttling, API rate limits, and strict time-based usage ceilings on Claude Code sessions, particularly during periods of heavy demand.
It was clear that Anthropic was running out of inference capacity. While training an AI model is an expensive, one-time computational undertaking, serving that model to millions of users simultaneously creates a continuous, round-the-clock demand for compute that scales directly with every new user and every new query. The apparent solution is to build more data centers, which Anthropic is apparently pursuing via massive gigawatt deals with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia.
However, modern hyperscale AI data centers can cost tens of billions of dollars and take years to build. Utilities are increasingly struggling to supply sufficient electricity for AI projects, while land, transformers, cooling infrastructure, and high-end GPUs themselves remain constrained. There is also growing sentiment against AI infrastructure from local communities. We recently reported that a U.S. senator got physical with a reporter after a confrontation on a data center issue.
Anthropic's compute capacity problem was immediate and urgent, but the solution was significantly long-term. If only there were a massive AI supercluster with hundreds of megawatts of compute power just sitting there. Turns out there was: SpaceXAI’s Colossus 1. Following the deal, Colossus 1’s entire computing power now belongs to Anthropic — for now.
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