SpaceX has signed a deal that changes how we view what the company actually is. Google has committed to paying Elon Musk $920 million every month for access to computing power. The total value of the contract exceeds $30 billion. And all of this comes just one week before the largest initial public offering in the history of the U.S. market.
How did a rocket company end up renting graphics processors to one of the world's wealthiest technology companies?
Google Is Short on Computing Power
Google has more customers than it expected. A Google Cloud spokesperson put it this way in a statement to the media: "This is a short-term, time-sensitive agreement that will provide us with bridge capacity to meet growing demand for our Gemini Enterprise agentic platform. Interest is higher than we expected."
Gemini Enterprise, an artificial intelligence subscription service for large companies, has run into physical limitations. Although Google operates a global network of its own data centers and plans capital expenditures of more than $180 billion for 2026, building a new data center takes years. Nvidia's high-performance graphics processors are scarce, and the waiting list for them is long. So the only solution is to rent capacity from a competitor.
110,000 GPUs and the Colossus Data Center
According to SpaceX, Google will gain access to approximately 110,000 Nvidia graphics processors, along with central processing units, memory, and other components. The entire agreement will run from October 2026 to June 2029.
The capacity likely comes from the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. It was originally built by xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence company, for its own Grok model training needs. Following the merger of SpaceX and xAI in February 2026, which valued the combined entity at more than one trillion dollars, this infrastructure became part of SpaceX.
An interesting detail: xAI has since moved its main training workloads to the Colossus 2 data center. Colossus 1 was therefore left partially unused, giving SpaceX a compelling reason to rent it out. Google is gaining roughly half the computing power that Anthropic has access to at the same location.
A Similar Deal With Anthropic
Google is not SpaceX's first major computing power customer. In May, SpaceX announced a similar agreement with Anthropic. The American artificial intelligence company committed to paying $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for access to the full capacity of the Colossus 1 data center. Anthropic has access to more than 220,000 graphics processors, approximately twice as many as Google will receive.
The deal with Anthropic has expanded further. Anthropic co-founder and head of compute strategy Tom Brown confirmed that the contract had also been extended to the second data center, Colossus 2. Together, the two contracts will bring SpaceX more than $26 billion annually. If both agreements remain in place until their scheduled expiration dates, their combined value will exceed $70 billion.
SpaceX Is Becoming a Cloud Provider
Just a few years ago, SpaceX was a Google customer: in 2021, it signed a contract under which Google supplied it with computing capacity to operate the Starlink satellite network. Today, the roles have reversed. SpaceX wrote in its stock market prospectus: "We believe that our computing infrastructure and the strategy associated with it provide us with significant flexibility in how we allocate and monetize capacity."
Revenue from data centers is expected to exceed everything SpaceX earned from Starlink, space launches, and artificial intelligence combined in all of 2025. A company that aimed to travel to Mars is becoming one of the world's largest private operators of AI infrastructure overnight.
Sources: ft.com, techcrunch.com, hypebeast.com and tomshardware.com
