Google paying rival Musk $920m a month for data centre space
06.06.2026, DPA
Elon Musk's space company SpaceX will collect $920 million a month from Google in the coming years for renting its computer power to its giant tech competitor.
Google needs the computer capacity for its artificial intelligence (AI) services. The agreement runs from October this year until the end of June 2029.
In a similar deal, rival AI company Anthropic is also buying computing power from SpaceX for $1.25 billion a month under a multi-year agreement.
Musk folded his own AI company xAI into SpaceX and built several data centres for the firm. After the arrangement with Anthropic announced a few weeks ago, he said one of the data centres would be sufficient for SpaceX's AI activities.
The AI chatbot Grok is being developed at xAI and now SpaceX. Grok is used less than OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's rival software Gemini.
By renting urgently needed computing power to Anthropic and Google, Musk is also helping the companies in their competition with rival OpenAI. Musk, a former co-founder of Open AI, has been feuding with the firm for years.
AI infrastructure is expensive. Google alone has indicated capital spending of up to $190 billion for this year, which is mainly intended for data centres.
SpaceX can make good use of the money
SpaceX plans to go public next week and is seeking a total valuation of $1.7 trillion as well as record revenues of $75 billion.
SpaceX's pure business figures stand in stark contrast to the targeted stock market valuation, with investors expected to pay more for the hope of future successes.
Last year, the company posted losses of around $4.94 billion on revenue of $18.67 billion. The rental of the data centres alone is set to improve these figures significantly.
AFP
June 5, 2026
SpaceX on Friday signed a blockbuster cloud computing agreement under which Google will pay the Elon Musk-founded rocket company $920 million per month for access to a massive cluster of AI chips, according to a disclosure in its initial public offering filing.
The deal, which will bolster SpaceX’s finances ahead of its IPO on June 12, covers a computing infrastructure of approximately 110,000 Nvidia GPUs — the crucial hardware needed to power Google’s Gemini AI models.
The filing says Google will begin paying the full monthly rate in October 2026, with a reduced fee applying during a ramp-up period until then.
The agreement runs through June 2029, implying total payments of roughly $30 billion over the life of the contract.
The deal resembles one struck with AI giant Anthropic, in which SpaceX leased compute capacity at its Colossus data centers in Memphis, Tennessee for $1.25 billion a month.
The facilities were originally built to power Musk’s rival AI venture, xAI.
SpaceX’s IPO filing revealed that xAI last year posted an operating loss of $6.4 billion on total revenue of $3.2 billion.
“This is a short-term, timely agreement to ensure we have bridge capacity to meet surging customer demand for our agent platform, Gemini Enterprise, which has been even higher than we expected,” a Google Cloud spokesperson said in an email to AFP.
The filing adds that after December 31, “the agreement may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.”
The deals with Google and Anthropic come just days ahead of SpaceX’s IPO, which will be the biggest in history, valuing the company at $1.8 trillion.
That valuation is largely based on faith that Musk can deliver on his ambitions to vastly expand his Starlink satellite business, put data centers into space using SpaceX rockets, as well as begin colonizing Mars.
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