Elon Musk makes a clarification on SpaceX’s $1.25 billion-a-month deal with Anthropic, says: We will take back Colossus if …

Elon Musk on Thursday (May 28) publicly clarified the details of the SpaceX's data centre arrangement with AI company Anthropic. He said that the deal covering its flagship Colossus supercomputing clusters is a six-month lease, and not the multi-year commitment that earlier reports had suggested. He also mentioned that the company will take back some computing power if it becomes “supertight” for the company to meet its own requirement.Earlier this year, SpaceX signed agreements under which Anthropic would pay the company $1.25 billion per month to access computing capacity from its Colossus and Colossus II data centre clusters, located in Memphis, Tennessee. The arrangement will reportedly run through May 2029, and drew significant attention given the scale of the financial commitment involved.The agreement, he said, is structured as a 180-day lease, with a mutual 90-day cancellation notice available to either party after that. “SpaceX has not committed to leasing Colossus for years, although it’s possible that may be what happens. This is a 180 day lease with 90 day notice mutual cancellation thereafter. The short term was our request, not Anthropic’s,” Musk wrote in a post on X.He added: “We won’t leave them hanging and will provide a reasonable off-ramp, but if compute gets super tight I said we might need it back at some point.”That last line carries weight because Musk is clearly saying that Colossus is not a resource it has handed off indefinitely, but an infrastructure it retains practical control over, and could reclaim if its own AI operations demanded it.The clarification comes against a backdrop of SpaceX actively positioning itself as a major player in the AI computing market beyond its existing arrangement with Anthropic. Last week, Musk posted on X that SpaceX was in discussions with multiple companies about “offering AI compute as a service at significant scale”, essentially signalling that the company wants to commercialise its supercomputing infrastructure more broadly rather than tie it to any single client on a long-term basis.SpaceX's AI segment lost about $2.5 billion from operations in the March quarter, on segment revenue of $818 million, according to its IPO filing.