SpaceX rented its Colossus 1 data centre to Anthropic for $1.25 billion per month not out of surplus capacity, but because it couldn't make the facility work for training Grok. The Memphis site suffered latency issues when connecting to two other campuses over 10 miles away, compounded by aging network infrastructure. Hardware mismatches between Hopper, Blackwell, and older Nvidia accelerators created bottlenecks in distributed training. Colossus 2 and 3 were built with uniform Blackwell chips, making them more suitable for large-scale AI training clusters. Combined with a $920M/month Google compute deal, SpaceX now earns roughly $2.17B/month from infrastructure it originally built for itself. Meanwhile, Grok's downloads dropped from 20M in January to 8.3M in April, and paid conversion is a fifth of ChatGPT's, making the rental income increasingly central to SpaceX's AI business model.
