xAI leases Colossus 1 supercomputer to Anthropic for $5B ahead of planned IPO
Elon Musks xAI, recently rebranded as SpaceXAI, is leasing its Colossus 1 AI supercomputer to Anthropic in a deal projected to generate $5 to $6 billion in annual revenue. The arrangement, announced on May 6, 2026, hands a direct competitor access to more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs while xAI shifts its own workloads to the newer Colossus 2 cluster. The lease comes at a strategically convenient moment. xAI is reportedly positioning for an IPO that analysts estimate could value the company at $75 billion or more. Turning idle silicon into a multi-billion-dollar revenue stream right before going public is, to put it mildly, not an accident. What Colossus 1 actually is, and why Anthropic wants it Colossus 1 was xAIs flagship supercomputer, built at a pace that raised eyebrows across the industry. The initial build was completed in just 122 days back in 2024. The cluster packs more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including H100, H200, and GB200 models. The lease provides Anthropic with 300 megawatts of compute capacity, which the company plans to use for training and running its Claude family of models. For Anthropic, this is about raw compute access in a market where GPUs remain scarce relative to demand. The company, backed