Even Google rents AI servers from Elon Musk, and the numbers are staggering

On June 12, SpaceX will make its debut on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SPCX, aiming to raise $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion, which would make it the largest IPO in history. Its trump card is neither Starlink nor its rockets: two compute-rental contracts secure nearly $75 billion in contracted future revenue.Anthropic is paying $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 to occupy the entirety of the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. Google, for its part, is paying $920 million per month to access a cluster of approximately 110,000 Nvidia GPUs within SpaceX’s infrastructure.

Why did Grok leave 89% of its servers idle?

In 2024, xAI, Elon Musk’s AI division, was building Colossus 1 in 122 days near Memphis to train Grok, its rival to ChatGPT and Claude. With more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs in a mixed architecture (combining H100, H200, and GB200 chips), the data center was described as one of the most powerful clusters on the planet when it came online. The problem arose from this heterogeneous architecture, which proved difficult to parallelize for Grok training, prompting xAI to move its training workload to the new Colossus 2.

Meanwhile, Grok was not attracting the expected users. Daily active mobile users fell from 13.9 million in March 2026 to 12.2 million in April, a drop of nearly 13% in one month (more than 16% in the United States alone). Meanwhile, according to an internal memo, Colossus 1 was operating at only 11% of capacity, far below the usual 35% to 45% for this type of infrastructure, and SpaceX’s AI segment reported an operating loss of $2.47 billion in the first quarter of 2026 on approximately $800 million in revenue.

With 89% of servers idle and xAI in the red (6.4 billion in operating losses in 2025), SpaceX has decided to rent out the infrastructure to third parties. Elon Musk had nevertheless described Anthropic as “malicious”, “misanthropic” and “woke” in various public statements. He signed an exclusivity agreement with it for Colossus 1 worth $1.25 billion per month, then stated that no one at Anthropic “had triggered its malevolence detector”. Google followed suit at $920 million per month.

Google, the global champion of AI computing, cashes in like the others

Google’s situation may be the most revealing of the excesses of the AI race. Alphabet is often cited as the company that, by itself, has the world’s largest AI computing capacity. This is no longer enough: the group has budgeted $185 billion in capital expenditure for 2026 (twice the previous year’s figure), and demand for Gemini Enterprise, its AI agent platform, has exceeded forecasts.

To finance this, Alphabet raised nearly $31.5 billion in debt in less than twenty-four hours in February 2026, including a 100-year bond tranche denominated in pounds sterling: £1 billion at 6.125%, with demand ten times the amount offered. This is the first 100-year bond issued by a technology company since Motorola in 1997 (investors will have to wait until 2126 to find out whether they were right to place their faith in it).The level of spending is such that even 126 billion in cash no longer covers the pace of data-center construction and GPU purchases demanded by AI.

For users in France, the signal is less abstract than it appears. The usage limits you encounter on Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT are directly linked to the amount of computing power available for these services. Anthropic has made this very clear: on the day it announced its contract with SpaceX, the company doubled the usage limits for Claude Code.

The race to go public and the race for computing power overlap in a landscape where Musk, who built Colossus to dominate AI, ends up being its highest-paid owner, benefiting those who directly compete with him. It took Grok disappointing for SpaceX to discover its hidden vocation: an inadvertent funder of its most direct rivals.

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Source: SEC