SpaceX is quietly building an AI compute business that may become key to its eye-popping valuation | Fortune Home Under pressure by analysts to justify its eye-popping valuation, SpaceX is diversifying beyond rockets and satellites to a seemingly innocuous but lucrative business opportunity: renting out the unused computing capacity from its Colossus data center complex. In May, SpaceX agreed to give Anthropic access to roughly 325,000 Nvidia GPUs across its Colossus data centers for $1.25 billion per month. Weeks later, it struck a similar agreement to provide Google with about 110,000 GPUs for $920 million per month. Together, the two contracts could generate about $26 billion for the company annually—more than SpaceX’s entire revenue last year. With Musk’s ambitious plans for building orbital data centers and establishing a Mars colony likely years away, these deals may help explain how SpaceX can justify a $1.8 trillion valuation after its record-breaking IPO last month. Renting its unused compute gives SpaceX immediate revenue from infrastructure it has already built, while giving investors another reason to view the company as more than a rocket manufacturer, as Musk has repeatedly positioned it, according to Sean Cray, a senior analyst covering telecom, media and technology at Moody’s.
Published: July 19, 2026 11:00 am
Source: Fortune — Read original