Monday May 25
FUNDINGAnthropic

$45 Billion, On A 90-Day Leash

20MAY

SpaceX's IPO filing (S-1) reveals Anthropic pays $1.25 billion per month to use xAI's COLOSSUS supercomputers through May 2029. 90-day cancellation clause.

Anthropic just put 35% of annual revenue with one supplier. That's $15B per year flowing one direction. Cancellable in 90 days either way.

SpaceX's IPO now depends on Anthropic the way OpenAI depends on Microsoft. The AI cap table is interlocking. Labs financing each other's revenue is now public. Compute-spend as a percent of revenue becomes a board-level diligence metric this year.

Every frontier lab's compute commitments are about to surface in SEC filings. Flag any AI vendor whose ratio exceeds 30% as carrying durable cash-burn risk.

full brief & sources

⚡ Why this matters

  • Anthropic's compute commitment to a single supplier is now public: $1.25B per month.
  • Compute-spend as a percent of revenue becomes a public diligence metric.
  • Every frontier lab's cap-table interlock is about to surface in SEC filings.

🔍 What happened

  • SpaceX filed its S-1 in mid-May 2026 ahead of IPO.
  • Discloses Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC for COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II compute.
  • $1.25 billion per month through May 2029. ~$45B over three years.
  • Capacity ramps May/June 2026 at a reduced fee.
  • 90-day termination clause both ways.
  • SpaceX uses the same compute internally to train Grok 5 at COLOSSUS II.
  • Simon Willison surfaced the contract language on May 20.

💬 Smart takes

  • Willison: "This was rumored. Now it's priced."
  • SpaceX S-1 (verbatim): "We have the ability to use compute resources to support our proprietary AI applications (such as Grok 5)... while also providing access to select compute capacity to third-party customers."
  • Skeptic: $45B headline is misleading. 90-day cancellation means no long-term lock-in. Anthropic also diversifies across AWS ($40B), Google Cloud ($40B), Akamai ($1.8B). xAI is one of four streams.

🧭 Where this goes

  1. SpaceX IPO roadshow names the contract value as durable revenue.
  2. Other frontier labs face disclosure pressure on compute commitments in their next funding rounds.
  3. 90-day clause renewal by Q3 = validation. First reduction = capacity ramp slipped.
  4. SpaceX IPO becomes meaningfully Anthropic-dependent, like OpenAI is Microsoft-dependent.
  5. Compute-spend-as-percent-of-revenue becomes a board-level diligence question by Q4.

🎯 Implication

  • For execs tracking AI vendor risk: add compute-spend as a percent of revenue to your model. Over 30% carries durable cash-burn risk.
  • For CFOs of AI-spending enterprises: if your AI vendor depends on a 90-day cancellable contract with a single anchor compute supplier, that's a 90-day continuity cliff.
·Simon Willison - A quote from SpaceX S-1 (May 20)·SEC EDGAR - SpaceX S-1 (primary filing)