Anthropic turns to SpaceX to double the data rates of Claude, but there's a trap

Anthropic announced on Tuesday, May 6, an agreement with SpaceX during its Code With Claude conference in San Francisco. The company will use the entire Colossus 1 datacenter.Over 300 megawatts of additional power and 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs (a mix of H100, H200, and GB200) available within the month. Direct consequence: the usage limits for Claude increase for all paid subscribers.

Good news as these users had been complaining for several months about overly restrictive caps, sometimes even unsubscribing from the service.

What's changing (and what's not) for subscribers

Pro subscribers (20€/month) and Max (100 to 200€/month) see their bandwidth doubled during a five-hour window. Peak hour restrictions (introduced at the end of March 2026 after a wave of complaints) disappear. The API limits for Claude Opus also increase significantly. Team and Enterprise plans per location benefit from the same increases.

A detail that is important (and one that official communication doesn't really highlight): weekly caps remain the same. What doubles is the size of the faucet per session, not the reservoir for the week. In practice, most users didn't reach their weekly quota because the session-based limit blocked them beforehand. This limit is now removed.

The capacity of Colossus 1 powers the entire Anthropic inference infrastructure, including Claude.ai in its classic web version. Anthropic states that its collaboration with Amazon includes additional capacity in Asia and Europe. The goal: meet the data residency requirements of regulated companies (healthcare, finance, public sector). A point that directly concerns French companies subject to GDPR.

When Musk arms his own competitor

Elon Musk owns 42% of SpaceX. SpaceX merged with xAI in February 2026, creating the entity SpaceXAI. xAI develops Grok, a front-line competitor to Claude. The Colossus 1 datacenter, located in Memphis, had been built to train Grok. And it is Anthropic that inherits it.

The turnaround of Musk is worth savoring at his own pace. A few weeks before the agreement, he publicly called Anthropic "misanthropically and maliciously" biased. On May 6th, on X, he said he was "impressed" by the company's direction after a week spent with them. He now estimates that "Claude will probably be good" (between two rocket launches and three lawsuits, one can imagine that the schedule allows for such reassessment). Michael Nicolls, president of xAI, would have internally acknowledged that his company was "clearly behind" its competitors.

SpaceX is preparing an IPO with an estimated valuation of 1.5 trillion dollars. Renting 220,000 GPUs at market price generates immediate revenue. Anthropic, on the other hand, is negotiating a raise of 50 billion dollars at a valuation of 900 billion dollars. Both parties have the means to afford this paradox. Colossus 1 funds Colossus 2, the next generation of datacenters, and the ambition (still theoretical) of orbital computing.

Musk sells his GPUs to his rival to fund the next battle. At this rate, consistency remains the only luxury that Silicon Valley cannot afford.

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Source : xAI