xAI, now part of SpaceX, has signed massive GPU leasing deals with Anthropic and Google worth over $2 billion per month combined, enabling Anthropic to ease severe capacity constraints.

The contracts are structured so that, if they run ~18 months, xAI can effectively repay its datacenter capex while retaining substantial remaining GPU capacity, with power costs representing only about 1% of revenue. While there are elements of financial engineering and strategic positioning around the SpaceX IPO, xAI’s ability to rapidly build datacenters and profit from the ongoing compute shortage makes it resemble a high-margin datacentre REIT more than a pure frontier AI lab, and leaves Grok deprioritized relative to the rental business.