xAI leases Colossus 1 supercomputer to Anthropic for $5B annually ahead of planned IPO
SpaceXAI, the merged entity born from Elon Musks xAI and SpaceX, is leasing its Colossus 1 supercomputer cluster to rival AI company Anthropic for roughly $5 billion per year. The four-year deal, announced on May 6, hands Anthropic access to more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and 300 megawatts of power, giving it one of the largest compute footprints in the industry almost overnight. The timing is not subtle. xAI is preparing for an IPO slated for June 2026, with a target valuation of $1.75 trillion. Leasing out a massive but underused asset to a deep-pocketed competitor is one way to make the revenue line look significantly healthier before going public. Why lease your supercomputer to a competitor Colossus 1 was reportedly running at just 11% utilization. Industry benchmarks for GPU cluster utilization sit in the 35% to 45% range, meaning xAIs flagship supercomputer was operating at roughly a quarter of what would be considered normal. The lease is expected to generate between $5 billion and $6 billion annually for xAI. That cash flow directly offsets what have been reported as significant financial losses for the company. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of AI models, gets a massive compute injection without having to build