Anthropic secures access to Elon Musk's Colossus 1 supercomputer despite his past criticism of Claude

Anthropic has secured access to SpaceX/xAI's Colossus 1 supercomputer in Memphis, which contains roughly 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. Musk reportedly approved the deal after meetings with Anthropic leadership, despite previously calling Claude 'misanthropic and evil.'

The partnership reflects a shift in AI industry dynamics: companies controlling large Nvidia GPU clusters are gaining leverage alongside chip makers themselves. AI labs now need enormous compute capacity not just for training models, but for inference (the step where an AI produces answers) serving millions of users in real time.

Anthropic raised Claude usage limits shortly after the compute partnership surfaced, indicating the new capacity is already being deployed for its enterprise and coding products.