Musk Gives 220k GPUs to Claude; Anthropic’s $1.2T Valuation Crowned AI King

Compute‑hedge model failure at xAI

In 2023 xAI was founded to build a competitor to ChatGPT. By early 2024 the team built Colossus 1 in Memphis, Tennessee in 122 days, creating one of the world’s largest single‑site AI compute clusters. Industry reports indicated that Colossus 1’s model utilisation was only about 11 % , far below the industry average of ~40 %.

Because the revenue from Grok subscriptions and X‑platform services could not cover the capital‑intensive data‑center investment, training workloads were moved to the newer Colossus 2 . The idle capacity of Colossus 1 was then rented to Anthropic, turning the under‑used GPUs into pure profit and providing a valuation narrative for SpaceX’s planned IPO.

Anthropic’s compute alliance

Anthropic’s first‑quarter 2025 data show an 80× year‑over‑year increase in both annualised revenue and usage, creating an immediate demand for additional compute. To address this, Anthropic secured a multi‑partner compute alliance:

Amazon committed 5 GW of capacity and a $25 B investment.

Google and Broadcom together pledged 5 GW of TPU capacity with a $40 B investment.

Microsoft and Nvidia allocated $300 B of Azure GPU capacity.

Fluidstack announced a $50 B infrastructure investment.

The combined pledged capacity exceeds 10 GW , but most of it will not be operational until late 2026 or 2027. Consequently Anthropic faces today’s “use‑volume bottleneck”, with frequent Claude service outages and half of the last 90 days spent in degraded mode.

Valuation dynamics

Pre‑IPO market data show that within seven days Anthropic’s implied valuation rose 20 % to $1.2 trillion, a cumulative increase of 900 % since October 2025, putting it roughly 20 % above OpenAI. If the IPO proceeds at this valuation, Anthropic would rank among the world’s top‑11 public companies, behind Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia.

Recent commercial actions

Anthropic formed a $1.5 B AI‑services joint venture with BlackRock, Hellman & Freeman and Goldman Sachs.

At the Code with Claude developer conference, Claude Opus 4.7 was launched with finance‑focused agents and deep integration into Microsoft 365 and Moody’s.

A partnership with SpaceX was announced to develop gigawatt‑scale orbital AI compute, making Anthropic the first large‑model company to publicly commit to a space‑based data centre.

These moves rely on the immediate availability of SpaceX’s 220 000 GPUs (≈300 MW) to alleviate Anthropic’s current compute shortfall.

References

https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex

https://x.com/i/trending/2052067243446476964

https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2052042082185809991