Elon Musk reversed his previous criticism, publicly praising Anthropic as the current AI leader, and promised not to cut off SpaceX's server access despite direct competition. This follows Anthropic's $40 billion compute deal making it the largest customer of xAI's Colossus data center. This shift signals a potential de-escalation in the AI arms race and highlights the immense value of compute infrastructure, as Anthropic's massive commitment reshapes the competitive landscape between leading AI labs and cloud providers. Under the deal, Anthropic purchased 300 megawatts of compute power, leasing the entire capacity of xAI's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, with payments of $1.25 billion per month starting May 2029, totaling approximately $40 billion. Musk also claimed that no other company has released a model comparable to Anthropic's Mythos/Fable series.
Background
Colossus is a data center developed by xAI, built in Memphis and operational since July 2024, primarily used to train xAI's Grok chatbot. Anthropic's Claude Fable 5, a 'Mythos-class' model, was recently launched and is claimed to be state-of-the-art on nearly all benchmarks. The massive compute deal underscores the critical importance of infrastructure in the AI industry.