Anthropic will pay Elon Musk’s SpaceX $1.25 billion a month over the next three years to rent space at the company’s xAI data centers, an IPO filing has revealed, along with an insight into Starlink's current coverage capacity.

The IPO document, lodged with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ahead of rocket company SpaceX’s much-anticipated public listing later this year, lifts the lid on Musk’s firm and its plans to deploy compute infrastructure in space.

Musk earlier this year combined SpaceX with xAI, his AI start-up that has developed the Grok chatbot and built a cluster of data centers in Memphis, Tennessee. That venture, in turn, owns social media platform X, and together the companies could be valued at more than $1 trillion when they debut on the stock market.

SpaceX banks Anthropic billions, turns cloud provider

SpaceX announced earlier this month that it would be renting 300 megawatts (MW) of data center space at its xAI data centers to Anthropic.

The IPO filing reveals that AI lab Anthropic, which makes Grok competitor Claude, will pay $1.25 billion per month for the privilege, with the contract running until May 2029. The deal can be terminated by either party with 90 days notice.

SpaceX/xAI in a separate agreement last month said AI code editing startup Cursor would also be using space at xAI data centers, and in the IPO document it reports that other firms could rent its data center capacity, effectively turning it into a cloud provider.

“We have sufficient capacity to provide compute for our own AI models, including support of our training and inference demands, and to satisfy the obligations under these agreements,” SpaceX noted in the filing. “We expect to enter into additional similar services contracts for compute capacity with third parties.”

It is perhaps no surprise that SpaceX is looking to rent out some of its graphic processing units (GPUs) given the massive losses sustained by xAI. The document shows that xAI lost $2.4 billion during the first three months of this year compared to $936 million a year ago.

The losses stem from significant capex investments to fund its data centers. It spent $12.7 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025, but had already shelled out $7.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, suggesting an annual spend closer to $30 billion.

Can SpaceX deliver orbital data centers?

Central to Musk’s investor pitch is that SpaceX will be able to put data centers in orbit, harnessing the power of the sun.

In January, SpaceX requested permission to launch up to one million space data center satellites, and in its IPO filing said it could launch these as soon as 2028.

Other companies, notably Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin, are also looking at putting compute in space, but SpaceX believes that it is uniquely positioned to deliver orbital data centers thanks to its Starlink constellation of communications satellites.

“We plan to advance thermal control systems – many of which have been proven on Starlink – by using radiators, vapor chambers, active cooling loops, and coatings to dissipate the heat generated by AI hardware in space’s vacuum," SpaceX wrote. “We will also utilize inter-satellite lasers pioneered by Starlink for mesh networking at scale, creating coherent computing clusters across free space instead of wired connections used in terrestrial data centers. Our existing Starlink constellation, with over 23,000 inter-satellite lasers, will be a crucial enabler of orbital AI compute as its global network allows data from our AI compute satellites in Sun-synchronous orbit to reach ground stations anywhere on Earth.”

It adds that the SpaceX AI compute satellites “will be designed for high-rate, automated production to enable the scale of satellites needed for the large amounts of compute planned in space.”

Despite this bullishness, the document also concedes that many of the technologies, systems, and operational capabilities needed to put data centers in space are “novel and untested.”

“We expect to incur significant capital expenditures over a period of years before our AI products and services and other strategic initiatives, including AI compute infrastructure and in-orbit, lunar, and interplanetary industrialization efforts, become profitable, which may never occur," the SpaceX filing notes.

Starlink 'secrets' revealed

Like xAI, Starlink is expected to be folded into SpaceX with the proposed listing. As of March 31, the IPO claimed Starlink's network served about 10.3 million Starlink subscribers across 164 countries, territories, and other markets, with median residential download speeds of 225 Mb/s during peak hours and median latency of about 25 milliseconds. 

The filing also claimed Starlink can provide service everywhere on Earth, including the North and South poles, and that its current service is supported by roughly 9,600 broadband and mobile satellites in orbit, 3,100 of which were launched last year.

Another nugget revealed the company has reduced Starlink satellite manufacturing cost per gigabit of downlink capacity by about three times from its original V1 broadband satellites to V2 Mini satellites, with a planned nine-times reduction from V1 to the next-gen V3 iteration, which are designed to deliver 1 Tb/s of downlink capacity each. SpaceX said its current constellation supports more than 700 Tb/s of cumulative downlink capacity.

For mobile networking, the IPO stated Starlink Mobile supplements terrestrial networks and reduces mobile dead zones in around 30 countries, with support from around 30 mobile network operators across six continents. It says the current V1 Mobile constellation has about 650 satellites and supports light data, text messaging, and over-the-top voice services, while serving roughly 7.4 million monthly unique devices.

The filing adds that users connect through proprietary Starlink terminals, including a performance terminal that can exceed 450 Mb/s download.

Additional reporting by Giacomo Lee for SDxCentral