First came Anthropic, then Google. Currently, open source AI startup Reflection relies on SpaceX as a rich source of AI chips.
Reflection AI told TechCrunch that it will pay $150 million per month from July 1, 2026 through 2029 for immediate access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 AI chips and supporting hardware across SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, Tennessee. The deal is valued at up to $6.3 billion, with both companies having the option to terminate the deal after the first three months with 90 days’ notice.
The deal is smaller than SpaceX’s deals with Anthropic and Google, which cost the companies $1.25 billion per month and $920 million per month, respectively. These contracts also run until July 2029, but Elon Musk has publicly downplayed the three-year period and emphasized that the contracts can be terminated at any time.
Reflection used its first compute deal to tout the value of its open-weight AI strategy, which it pitches as an open-source alternative to closed frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. Openweight AI models that expose trained parameters are gaining more attention after the US government banned Anthropic’s closed models Fable and Mythos.
The startup, founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers, says the compute deal is one of the largest open AI infrastructure efforts ever announced.
“Recent events highlight how important open source is to the AI ecosystem, as more countries and companies recognize the risks and costs associated with relying solely on closed models,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “The agreement with SpaceXAI demonstrates Reflection’s strategic importance in the frontier AI ecosystem, and the increase in compute means an expanded runway to build the world’s best open models at scale.”
The Colossus data center was originally built by xAI, a company founded by Elon Musk and now part of SpaceX, for its own AI efforts. As its internal pursuits stalled, SpaceX began utilizing its valuable AI chips and lending them to the world’s leading AI research institutes.
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