SpaceX Rents Colossus 1 Data Center to Anthropic Amid Latency, Hardware Issues

According to Bloomberg, SpaceX recently decided to rent out the full computational capacity of its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee to Anthropic after encountering technical challenges while training and running its Grok AI model.

The company faced latency problems connecting Colossus 1 with two other facilities located over 10 miles away, compounded by outdated network infrastructure. Additionally, Colossus 1 houses mixed generations of Nvidia AI chips including Hopper and Blackwell systems alongside older accelerators, creating hardware bottlenecks that slow overall cluster performance. SpaceX and Anthropic, along with Alphabet's Google, have signed computing service agreements valued at potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in coming years.