Future Technology[Daily Briefing] SpaceX rents out AI 🛰️, OpenAI Codex box 🤖, Notion breached 🔓
Today's big one
SpaceX just quietly became one of the biggest AI landlords in the world
Here's a number that should stop you: $150 million a month. That's what an open-source AI startup called Reflection has agreed to pay SpaceX, starting today, for access to Nvidia GB300 chips inside Elon Musk's Colossus 2 data centre in Memphis. Run it to the end of 2029 and the deal is worth up to $6.3 billion.
What makes this odd is who's on each side. Reflection AI was founded by ex-Google DeepMind researchers, it's backed by Nvidia, and it has never put a single product in front of the public. No chatbot, no app, nothing you can sign up for. It's paying supercomputer money to a rocket company for compute it will use to build open-weight models pitched at national security.
SpaceX is the real story though. Colossus started as Musk's own AI training rig. Now it's a commercial cloud, and it has already signed deals with Anthropic, Google and Cursor. Committed revenue from outside customers now runs past $80 billion through 2029. That puts SpaceX in the same sentence as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, which is not a sentence anyone was writing eighteen months ago.
Why it matters: The company that lands rockets is now renting out AI compute at a scale that rivals the big three clouds. If you've been treating AWS, Microsoft and Google as the only serious infrastructure players, that map is already out of date. And either side can walk after 90 days' notice, so watch whether Reflection actually keeps the capacity or quietly hands it back.
Quick hits
OpenAI is putting Codex in a box. A literal one. The company is unveiling new Codex hardware on 15 July, and leaked images show a physical control panel, not just software. An AI coding agent you can touch is a genuinely strange direction, and I'm here for it. Read more (2 minute read)
Digital Realty is spending $7.8 billion on three data centres in one go. It's buying three fully-leased Northern Virginia sites from Blackstone, betting the AI infrastructure boom has years left to run. When the boring companies start writing eight-billion-dollar cheques, the boom is not slowing down. Read more (2 minute read)
Tidal is about to slap an "AI-made" label on tracks. From 15 July, the streaming service will badge fully AI-generated songs because it's drowning in them. The honest move, but it also quietly admits how much synthetic music is already in your recommendations. Read more (2 minute read)
110 million Notion accounts, one hacker, one very bad week. A breach hit the productivity app used by half of tech, and because Notion is where people paste API keys and half-finished business plans, the exposed data is nastier than the usual email dump. If you use it, go search your workspace for anything sensitive tonight. Read more (2 minute read)
Tool of the day
Have I Been Pwned
With the Notion breach fresh, this is the one to bookmark. You type in your email, it tells you every known breach your address has turned up in, going back years. It's free, it's run by a respected security researcher, and it's genuinely useful if you want to know which accounts to lock down first. Skip it only if you enjoy surprises. Read more (2 minute read)
Genuine question for you: SpaceX renting out AI compute for $150 million a month. Impressive, or does one company doing rockets, satellites, cars and now cloud make you slightly nervous? Hit reply, I read every one.
Nath, Future Technology
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