Anthropic, the developer of the artificial intelligence model Claude, has agreed to lease capacity from a data center run by xAI, the AI company led by Elon Musk. The deal allows Anthropic to ease an immediate pressure point after it had been forced to restrict customer usage due to a shortage of computing infrastructure.
Anthropic said Tuesday it has secured access to computing capacity at xAI's "Colossus 1" data center in Memphis, Tennessee. xAI became a subsidiary of SpaceX following a merger in February this year.
Anthropic has obtained 300 megawatts of computing capacity, including more than 220,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs). Using these resources, the company has doubled the usage limit for paid users of Claude Code, its coding tool that has seen strong corporate demand. The volume of work users can perform within the five-hour window has now doubled.
Compared with OpenAI, which has been building massive data centers with SoftBank for some time, Anthropic has been criticized for its shortage of computing resources. As the industry enters the agentic era this year — in which AI autonomously carries out tasks — and Claude's popularity has surged, Anthropic has had little choice but to cap usage.
The tie-up between Anthropic and SpaceX, also AI competitors, is seen as a meeting of interests. SpaceX generates leasing revenue, while Anthropic can stabilize its service. In particular, Anthropic, which is heading toward a year-end listing, can now accelerate its service competition with OpenAI.
