Three months ago, Elon Musk called Anthropic “evil” and “misanthropic” on X. This week, he leased the AI lab the world’s biggest supercomputer.
But analysts tell Fortune the deal has little to do with Anthropic as a company—and everything to do with an upcoming prospectus. SpaceX is expected to begin its public roadshow next month, targeting a valuation between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion. The announcement—paired with Musk dissolving his AI company xAI into SpaceX—gives the IPO something it didn’t have a week ago: a marquee AI customer for a credible cloud-infrastructure business.
According to estimates from Antoine Chkaiban, an analyst at New Street Research, the Anthropic deal will generate $3 billion to $4 billion in annual revenue for SpaceX, with more than $2.5 billion in cash profit. The margins seem extreme, but the data center is already built: fixed capital expense is sunk, and the only meaningful operating cost is electricity plus minimal staffing.
“He’s not going to want multiple billions of dollars of GPUs sitting idle,” Chkaiban told Fortune. “It’s a very good business decision.”
It appears to be the start of Musk’s transition from AI frontrunner to AI landlord. “He who controls the data center really does control the application of artificial intelligence right now,” Andrew Moore, former head of Google Cloud AI and now CEO of defense AI startup Lovelace AI, told Fortune.
The Hyperscaler Pivot
Colossus 1 contains roughly 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and was built in 2024 to train Grok, Musk’s AI assistant. But Grok hasn’t filled it. Chkaiban estimates Grok generates less than $1 billion in annualized revenue; Anthropic is on track for more than $40 billion. Musk has too much compute; Anthropic has too many users and not enough compute. Leasing Colossus 1 to Anthropic funds the gap.
It also lets Musk skip a step. The biggest cost line for frontier AI labs is the 30%-plus margin paid to AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. SpaceX captures those margins instead of paying it in stressful debt deals.
That framing—SpaceX as the fourth hyperscaler—is what Musk needs investors to accept before pricing. A SpaceX that can compete with AWS is worth a hyperscaler multiple, not a rocket company multiple. Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon trade at roughly twice the forward earnings multiple of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
But Moore was skeptical the pivot is easy. Enterprise customers pick data center locations based on energy costs and failsafes. Building one massive data center in Memphis doesn’t replicate AWS’s global footprint. “The battle is not just who’s got the most compute servers,” he said.
The Kill-Switch Clause
Musk already has something other compute providers don’t. In a reply on X, he wrote that SpaceX “reserves the right to reclaim the compute” if Anthropic’s AI “engages in actions that harm humanity.” The clause wasn’t in the formal press release, and it’s unclear whether it appears in the contract. But if enforceable, it gives Musk a powerful leash on one of three leading AI labs.
That power would matter less if Musk didn’t change his mind so often on AI. Moore, who was dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon during Musk’s loudest existential-risk phase, remembers him as “one of the loud voices saying that artificial intelligence is an existential threat for the human race.” Now he says AI will usher in a world of abundance.
Anthropic almost certainly has fallback plans. Frontier AI labs don’t single-source the data center their product depends on. “They will have contingency plans in three months, six months, twelve months,” Moore said.
Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, put the odds the deal lasts two years at 80%. “What makes it unique is Elon’s history,” he said. “He can change his mind. It’s less about the actual provision; it’s more just about who’s running the provision.”
Even if the contract holds, one of three frontier AI labs now operates on infrastructure controlled by the CEO of a competitor.