October 30 news: Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that AI unicorn Anthropic has officially surpassed the U.S. federal government to become the largest single customer of Elon Musk's SpaceX.
According to SpaceX's latest filing submitted last week, in the just-ended third quarter, about 34.5% of the company's revenue came from a single customer, and this mysterious buyer mainly purchased related services from SpaceX's artificial intelligence unit responsible for providing computing power. People familiar with the matter confirmed to the media that the buyer referred to as "Customer B" in the filing is Anthropic.
In terms of the specific cooperation, Anthropic mainly leases massive computing resources from SpaceX's data center in Memphis, Tennessee. According to Anthropic's previously released IPO prospectus, the long-term contract signed by the two parties will remain in effect until 2029, with a potential spending cap of up to $120.5 billion.
At the current pace of performance, starting in December this year, Anthropic's monthly payments to SpaceX will soar to about $3.1 billion. However, the contract terms also preserve a certain degree of flexibility for both parties: Anthropic has the right to unilaterally cancel the contract after early 2027 by giving 90 days' written notice. This deep cooperation not only reflects the almost bottomless massive demand of current frontier AI companies for underlying computing power, but also unexpectedly makes SpaceX one of the most profitable behind-the-scenes winners in this round of the AI gold rush.