SpaceX sells rocket launches and Starlink internet. But according to a Fortune investigation published July 19, the business quietly worth the most to the company’s eye-popping valuation right now isn’t either of those — it’s renting out AI compute, and it’s already lined up roughly $26 billion a year in contracts to do it.
Here’s the arithmetic behind that number, and why a rocket company ended up in the data center business almost by accident.
The Deal Nobody Expected: SpaceX as Anthropic’s Landlord
Back in May, Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month — about $15 billion a year — for compute capacity. That figure got confirmed again in June when SpaceX’s own IPO filing spelled out the terms: payments run through May 2029, adding up to nearly $45 billion over the life of the contract, according to Data Center Dynamics’ review of the filing.
What Anthropic is actually renting is Colossus 1, a data center near Memphis, Tennessee, packed with roughly 325,000 Nvidia GPUs and over 300 megawatts of capacity. The twist: xAI built Colossus for its own AI ambitions before folding into SpaceX — so Anthropic, a direct competitor to xAI’s Grok, is now paying SpaceX to rent hardware xAI built for itself.
Anthropic Isn’t the Only Tenant
Weeks after the Anthropic deal, SpaceX struck a similar arrangement with Google: about $920 million a month for access to roughly 110,000 GPUs, TechCrunch reported June 5. Stack the two contracts together and, per Fortune’s count, SpaceX is on pace to pull in somewhere near $26 billion annually just from renting out compute — before a single Falcon 9 lifts off or a Starlink subscription gets billed.
For context, Anthropic’s own compute appetite has been showing up all over the AI industry’s deal sheet lately — the company has separately been in talks with Meta over a compute lease worth billions, which tells you how stretched the supply of AI-grade data center capacity has become. When rocket companies and social media giants are both suddenly landlords to the same AI lab, that’s not a coincidence — it’s a shortage.
Why This Actually Matters for SpaceX’s Valuation
SpaceX went public this year, and Fortune’s framing is blunt: investors pricing the company almost entirely on rockets and Starlink may be missing a business line that scales faster and carries higher margins than either. Compute contracts don’t need a launch pad, a weather window, or a satellite constellation — they need idle GPUs and a data center lease, both of which SpaceX already had sitting inside the Colossus facilities it inherited from xAI.
That hasn’t stopped SpaceX’s stock from having a rough few months since its debut — shares sank below their IPO price earlier this year, a reminder that even a company with $26 billion in AI compute contracts on the books isn’t immune to a shaky public-market debut. But the compute business gives bulls a genuinely new argument: SpaceX isn’t just a space company hoping AI demand doesn’t crash. It’s already collecting rent from two of the biggest AI labs on the planet.
What’s Next
Fortune’s reporting also flags that SpaceX has discussed Pentagon-related compute work on top of the Anthropic and Google deals, and Anthropic itself has “expressed interest” in going further — working with SpaceX on developing multiple gigawatts of compute capacity in space, an idea that sounds like science fiction until you remember SpaceX is the one company that can actually put hardware in orbit cheaply. None of that is signed yet, but it’s the direction both companies are pointing.
For readers watching the AI compute crunch from the outside, the takeaway is simple: when a rocket company becomes one of the largest AI landlords on Earth within the space of a few months, that’s a sharper signal of how tight GPU supply really is than any chipmaker’s earnings call. Anthropic, for its part, says the deal will directly expand capacity for paid Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers — worth keeping in mind next time Anthropic’s own mega-IPO push comes up, since compute this expensive has to be paid for somehow.
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