NextFin News - A major discrepancy has emerged over one of the largest artificial intelligence infrastructure deals in history, pitting the regulatory disclosures of an IPO-bound giant against the public assertions of its billionaire leader.
On Thursday, Elon Musk publicly contradicted SpaceX’s own S-1 registration statement, claiming that the company’s landmark compute lease with AI developer Anthropic is merely a short-term, 180-day agreement. Writing on the social media platform X, Musk stated that SpaceX has not committed to leasing its Colossus supercomputer clusters in Memphis, Tennessee, for multiple years, though he conceded such an outcome remains possible. According to Musk, the short-term structure was established at the request of SpaceX rather than Anthropic, and includes a 90-day notice period for mutual cancellation thereafter.
This operational description stands in stark contrast to the formal financial terms presented to prospective investors just eight days ago. According to the S-1 filing submitted by SpaceX on May 20, Anthropic agreed to pay a monthly fee of $1.25 billion through May 2029 to secure dedicated access to the Colossus I and Colossus II GPU clusters. Over the course of the described three-year term, those payments would accumulate to an unprecedented $45 billion, effectively doubling the $18.7 billion in total revenue that SpaceX reported for the entirety of last year. The filing repeats this May 2029 timeline across multiple sections, including detailed financial notes, leaving little room for clerical error.
The root of the contradiction lies in the legal mechanics of the contract, specifically the 90-day cancellation clause. By combining a nominal three-year term with an immediate, rolling 90-day termination right, the agreement functions simultaneously as a multi-year strategic partnership on paper and a highly volatile, short-term rental in practice. For Anthropic, led by Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei, the deal secures immediate access to more than 220,000 Nvidia graphics processing units and 300 megawatts of power, providing the raw computational horsepower needed to train its next-generation models. Yet the lack of long-term structural security leaves the startup vulnerable to sudden capacity loss if relations with Musk sour.
This structural ambiguity serves distinct strategic purposes for both entities, though it introduces significant uncertainty for public markets. For SpaceX, showcasing a $45 billion revenue backlog through 2029 is a powerful tool to justify a premium valuation as it prepares for its initial public offering. Institutional investors typically prize highly predictable, recurring enterprise revenue, and a multi-year contract of this scale positions SpaceX not just as a rocket manufacturer, but as a premier AI physical infrastructure provider.
Conversely, Musk has strong incentives to downplay any long-term commitment to an external competitor. Earlier this year, Musk merged SpaceX with his own artificial intelligence startup, xAI, which originally built the Colossus facility. Because Anthropic competes directly with xAI’s Grok assistant, locking up SpaceX’s premier computing cluster in a rigid, multi-year contract would limit Musk’s ability to redirect those resources to his own proprietary models. By emphasizing the 180-day nature of the lease, Musk signals to the market that SpaceX retains ultimate control over its hardware and can reclaim the compute capacity on short notice if xAI’s training demands escalate.
The arrangement also highlights the shifting dynamics of the AI hardware market, where access to power and silicon has become the ultimate currency. While tech giants like Microsoft and Google have historically built their own proprietary data centers, the sheer speed of model development has forced frontier AI startups to seek capacity wherever it is immediately available. Renting from a direct competitor’s parent company underscores the desperation for high-end compute, even when the terms of that access remain highly contested.
Whether public investors will accept a $45 billion backlog that can vanish on a three-month notice remains a critical question for the upcoming SpaceX IPO. If the deal is indeed a rolling short-term lease, the projected revenue stream is far less stable than the headline figures in the S-1 filing suggest. For now, the conflicting narratives leave the market to decide whether the agreement represents a durable foundation for SpaceX’s financial future or a temporary marriage of convenience in an increasingly volatile industry.
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