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SpaceX just became one of the biggest AI landlords in the world

· 4 min read · By Future Technology

Key takeaways

  • Reflection AI will pay SpaceX $150 million a month, starting 1 July 2026, for Nvidia GB300 chips at the Colossus 2 data centre in Memphis
  • Run to 2029, the deal is worth up to $6.3 billion, though either side can exit on 90 days' notice after the first three months
  • Reflection AI is an open-source lab founded by ex-Google DeepMind staff, backed by Nvidia, with no public product yet
  • SpaceX's Colossus has become a commercial cloud rivalling AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, with committed outside revenue past $80 billion through 2029

Here is the number that reframes everything: $150 million a month. That is what Reflection AI, an open-source AI startup, has agreed to pay SpaceX starting 1 July 2026 for access to Nvidia GB300 chips inside Elon Musk's Colossus 2 data centre in Memphis, Tennessee. Carried through to 2029, the arrangement is worth up to $6.3 billion.

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Who is Reflection AI

Reflection AI was founded by researchers who left Google DeepMind, and it counts Nvidia among its backers. What it does not have is a product. No chatbot, no app, nothing the public can sign up for. It describes itself as an open frontier lab focused on national security and open-weight models, and it is now paying supercomputer-scale money for the compute to build them.

The real story is SpaceX

Colossus began life as Musk's own AI training cluster. It has since turned into a commercial computing platform, and this is not its first big customer. SpaceX has reportedly signed compute deals with Anthropic, Google and Cursor, and its committed revenue from outside clients now runs past $80 billion through 2029. That puts a rocket company in direct competition with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

The chips at the centre of it are Nvidia's GB300 accelerators, the current top of the range for AI workloads. Reflection gets immediate access to them and the surrounding hardware, housed and operated at the Colossus 2 facility.

What to watch

The exit clause matters. Either side can walk away on 90 days' notice once the first three months are up, so the $6.3 billion headline is a ceiling, not a guarantee. The real signal will be whether Reflection keeps drawing on the capacity a year from now or quietly hands it back. Either way, the map of who supplies AI compute at serious scale just gained a new name, and it is the one that lands rockets.

For more on how the infrastructure layer beneath AI is being rebuilt, see our coverage of Anthropic's talks to run Claude on custom Microsoft silicon and Samsung's $648 billion chip investment plan.

Sources