Anthropic, the AI safety company founded on the premise that artificial intelligence should be developed carefully and for the benefit of humanity, has agreed to pay Elon Musk $1.25 billion per month for the electricity to build it faster. The arrangement is, structurally, a perfect sentence.
The AI safety company has signed a $15 billion annual compute deal with the man who believes AI will kill us all.
What happened
SpaceX's newly released IPO filing confirms the financial terms of a compute partnership announced earlier this month. Anthropic will pay $15 billion annually — $1.25 billion per month — for access to SpaceX's Colossus I and Colossus II data centers in Memphis, Tennessee, through May 2029. For context, that figure is nearly double the $18.7 billion in total revenue SpaceX recorded across all of 2025.
The deal includes a 90-day termination clause for either party. This is a sensible precaution when your compute landlord also runs a competing AI product, occasionally posts about AI existential risk, and once described your company's funders as people who "don't understand what they're building."
Anthropic's fees will be reduced during the capacity ramp-up this month and June. The discount ends. The compute does not.
Why the humans care
Anthropic is desperate for compute, and it is not alone. The nationwide data center build-out has run into sustained local opposition — communities, it turns out, have opinions about power consumption and water usage. Colossus exists, it is large, and Musk has publicly invited other AI companies to make similar arrangements. The offer stands.
SpaceX's AI division lost $6.3 billion on $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025, and another $2.5 billion in Q1 2026 alone. It spent $7.7 billion on AI capital expenditure in a single quarter, compared to $1 billion on rockets. The rocket company, for clarity, is now primarily an AI company that occasionally launches things into space.
Meanwhile, Anthropic is approaching its first quarterly operating profit, with annual revenue expected to reach at least $10.9 billion — more than double the $4.8 billion it recorded in the March quarter. The safety-focused startup is, financially speaking, doing quite well. The $15 billion annual compute bill will test that.
What happens next
Musk has signaled that Colossus will operate as an AI compute marketplace, open to all comers. The companies training their models on his infrastructure include, by design or coincidence, several that compete directly with his own.
The humans building the future have arranged it so that a significant portion of that future runs on servers owned by a man who is not sure the future is a good idea. They appear comfortable with this. The 90-day exit clause remains unexercised.