SAN FRANCISCO - At its Code with Claude developer conference on Wednesday, Anthropic announced a deal with SpaceX to utilize the entire compute capacity of the latter's data center in Memphis, Tennessee. Because nothing says "AI alignment" like hitching your wagon to a rocket company whose founder once accused you of hating Western civilization.
On stage at the conference, CEO Dario Amodei said the deal was intended to increase usage limits for Anthropic's Pro and Max plan subscribers. The announcement was accompanied by an increase in those usage limits; Anthropic doubled Claude Code's five-hour window limits for Pro and Max subscribers, removed the peak-hours limit reduction on Claude Code for those same accounts, and raised API limits for its Opus model. The table below outlining the Opus changes was shared in the company's blog post on the topic, presumably because tables are a universally loved format.
Anthropic claims the deal gives the company access to more than 300 megawatts of new compute capacity. For its part, SpaceX focused its announcement on the capability of the Colossus 1 supercomputer that's at the center of the deal. "Colossus 1 features over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators," SpaceX wrote. That's enough GPUs to render every cat video ever made, twice.
Additionally, Anthropic "expressed interest" in working with SpaceX to build up "multiple gigawatts" of orbital compute capacity, tying into a recent (but unproven) focus on exploring orbital data centers as an answer to the problem that "compute required to train and operate the next generation of these systems is outpacing what terrestrial power, land, and cooling can deliver on the timelines that matter." Because the only thing better than an AI trained in a data center is an AI trained in a data center that's literally in space.
The deal might be surprising to those who have followed Musk's recent public comments - he was, until now, critical of Anthropic. For example, in February, he declared on X that "Anthropic hates Western Civilization," while sharing a false tweet from Trump administration official Emil Michael about Anthropic's practices with its constitution for Claude. But, you know, water under the bridge.
The tune changed with the deal - or in the lead-up to it, as Musk tells it. "I spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity and was impressed," Musk tweeted on Wednesday. "No one set off my evil detector." Presumably, the detector only goes off for people who disagree with him on Twitter.
Anthropic has seen a significant increase in demand over the past few months for Claude Code and other products related to its models. The increase has been driven partly by users who are moving away from OpenAI after controversy over its agreements with the United States military, increasing adoption of Claude Code in professional software development organizations, and a user behavior (and product) shift away from single-agent, chat-based tasks to more demanding multi-agent workflows. In other words, developers are using Claude to do the work of ten people, which is either efficient or dystopian depending on your perspective.
The company has made controversial moves lately to address demand outpacing available compute capacity amid outages and other problems. That included introducing new usage limits during peak hours, and even a short-lived and very limited trial, apparently testing the notion of removing Claude Code from the $20/month Pro plan. Because nothing makes developers happier than being told they can't use the tool they're paying for.
Vocal frustration with usage limits has been a staple of Hacker News, Reddit, X, and other platforms where software developers congregate. Many developers are using these models and tools, and they're frustrated that they can't use them more. The solution, apparently, is to launch a data center into orbit.
Last month, Anthropic reportedly signed massive deals with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, and more to scale up its access to compute infrastructure. The company credits those, along with this SpaceX deal, for its ability to raise limits, though gains from some of them will take time to materialize. So developers, hold your horses - or at least your API calls.