The uneasy peace between Elon Musk and Anthropic has officially been brokered with megawatts. At the Code with Claude 2026 conference, CEO Dario Amodei announced a deal granting Anthropic exclusive use of SpaceX’s entire Memphis data center, Colossus 1. This facility, packing over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs (spanning H100, H200, and next-gen GB200 accelerators), provides more than 300 megawatts of raw compute. It is a staggering infusion of hardware for a company that has been visibly throttling its users as demand for Claude Code explodes.
The Sellout We Saw Coming
This partnership is a masterclass in realpolitik. Just months ago, Musk was publicly declaring on X that ‘Anthropic hates Western Civilization.’ Now, he is waxing poetic about how the team ‘did not set off my evil detector’ after a week of charm offensives. The hypocrisy is staggering, but so is the desperation. Anthropic has been bleeding users fleeing OpenAI’s military contracts, but it could not handle the influx without choking on usage caps. The deal also includes a nebulous ‘interest’ in building ‘multiple gigawatts’ of orbital compute capacity, which sounds like vaporware designed to distract from the immediate, ugly reality: Anthropic just handed the keys to its compute infrastructure to a company run by its most vocal critic. This is not a partnership of equals; it is a strategic surrender for access to silicon.
Developers, You Are the Product
For the engineers and coders who have been griping on Reddit and Hacker News about throttled peak-hour limits, this news comes with a bitter aftertaste. Yes, Anthropic has doubled Claude Code’s five-hour window limits for Pro and Max subscribers and removed the draconian peak-hour reductions. API limits for the Opus model are also rising. But the narrative is clear: your access is a chip to be traded in boardroom deals. Anthropic is touting this as a win for users, but the real story is that the company ran out of compute because it overpromised and underbuilt. By tying its fate to Musk’s infrastructure, Anthropic has traded long-term independence for short-term capacity. Users should be wary; the terms of service on that orbital data center will not be written by developers.
Source: Arstechnica
