There are omens and signs that Elon Musk is losing interest in his AI Grok project .
The outfit has signed a $6.3 billion compute deal with Pentagon-linked Reflection. From July 2026, Reflection will pay $150 million a month for access to Nvidia GB300 GPUs at Colossus 2.
The deal runs through June 2029 and adds another fat rental contract to SpaceX’s fast-growing AI infrastructure racket.
However, this is the sort of computer space that Musk would need if he were going to be a contender in the AI race. If xAI needs compute to fight OpenAI and Anthropic, renting out the good stuff looks odd. If the compute earns more as a landlord, the AI model starts looking like a tenant with delusions.
SpaceX is not short of cash. After a huge IPO and a gigantic bond deal, the company is reportedly sitting on more than $100 billion.
Musk’s $60 billion Cursor acquisition is structured as an all-stock deal, so it does not dent SpaceX’s cash pile. That makes the aggressive compute monetisation harder to dismiss as emergency fundraising.
As of May 2026, Colossus 1 supported more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. That pile was split between H100, H200 and about 30,000 GB200 AI accelerators. Colossus 2 is even bigger, with more than 550,000 GPUs split between GB200 and GB300 accelerators.
In the run-up to its IPO, SpaceX locked a cloud service agreement with Google. The deal provided compute capacity equivalent to “110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, memory, and other related components” for $920 million a month.
SpaceX, the parent company of Starlink and xAI, then signed a similar deal with Anthropic. That contract gives access to “220,000 NVIDIA GPUs (including H100S, H200S, GB200s, and others)” for $1.25 billion a month, or $15 billion a year.
The Anthropic arrangement is tied to Colossus 1, where a messy mix of GPUs makes the site less attractive for training future Grok models. xAI consumes just 11 per cent of the available FLOPs there.
The Google deal is mostly linked to Colossus 2. Now Reflection gets a chunk of the same shiny infrastructure, raising the obvious question about what SpaceX thinks Grok is worth.
It may simply be that renting GPUs is a better business than trying to make Grok clever enough to compete.
There is another possibility. SpaceX may think foundation models are sliding towards commodity status as open-source models, particularly from China, keep improving.
If that happens, the winners may not be the labs shouting about artificial general intelligence. They may be the outfits selling access to the expensive boxes everyone else needs.
That leaves OpenAI and Anthropic looking at a strange future. Their rival’s parent company is renting them the shovels while supposedly digging in the same mine.
