xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, has leased the entire compute capacity of its Colossus 1 supercomputer in Memphis to Anthropic, the maker of Claude. The deal is worth approximately $1.25 billion per month, with a potential total value exceeding $40 billion if extended through May 2029.
A supercomputer looking for a purpose
Colossus 1 is no small operation. The facility packs more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs and draws over 300 megawatts of power. It was built in a remarkable 122 days and became operational in mid-2024, originally designed to train xAI’s Grok models.
The supercomputer’s mixed GPU architecture turned out to be a poor fit for effectively training Grok. Rather than retrofit or mothball the facility, xAI pivoted to monetization. The leasing agreement, signed on May 6, 2026, makes Anthropic the sole tenant of Colossus 1. Anthropic plans to use the compute primarily for inference tasks, which is the process of running trained AI models to generate responses, rather than training new ones from scratch.
Training requires all GPUs working in tight coordination on the same task. Inference is more forgiving of mixed hardware configurations, which makes Colossus 1’s architecture far better suited for Anthropic’s needs than it was for Grok’s.
