Musk Says SpaceX-Anthropic Deal Is 180-Day Lease, Not 3-Year Commitment

SpaceX's IPO filing and Elon Musk are telling investors two fundamentally different stories about the company's marquee AI compute deal. On page F‑62 of the S‑1 registration statement filed with the SEC, SpaceX disclosed that Anthropic "agreed to pay a monthly fee through May 2029" for data center space at the Colossus facility — language that implies a commitment running nearly three years from now, according to Reuters.

Less than 24 hours later, Musk took to X and flatly contradicted that characterization. "This is a 180 day lease with 90 day notice mutual cancellation," Musk posted on May 28. "The short term was our request, not Anthropic's." In a follow‑up, he added that SpaceX specifically asked for the shorter term because it wants flexibility to reclaim the capacity for its own AI subsidiary, xAI, reported the Financial Times.

The S‑1 does mention a 90‑day mutual cancellation clause — but it never specifies a 180‑day base term. The filing reads as though the deal is a multi‑year, nearly $45 billion commitment. Musk is now telling the public the maximum obligation is $7.5 billion over six months, according to TechCrunch.

The arithmetic gap is staggering. At the disclosed $1.25 billion monthly rate, the S‑1's "through May 2029" language, as TechCrunch noted, suggests approximately 36 months of payments — roughly $45 billion in total revenue for SpaceX's AI infrastructure segment. Musk's characterization of a 180‑day deal reduces the maximum commitment to $7.5 billion, a difference of $37.5 billion in potential contracted revenue, as Data Center Dynamics noted.

A person familiar with the deal terms confirmed to the Financial Times that the contract has a minimum 180‑day length but is open‑ended beyond that — meaning neither framing is entirely false, but each paints a radically different picture of revenue visibility for prospective shareholders. SpaceX's AI segment lost approximately $2.5 billion in Q1 2026 on just $818 million in revenue, according to Reuters.

For IPO investors, the distinction matters enormously. A 3‑year, $45 billion contracted backlog vs. a 6‑month, $7.5 billion arrangement produces completely different valuation models — and that gap will almost certainly be a central topic when SpaceX's roadshow begins June 8, according to CNBC.

Musk's X posts are especially notable because SpaceX is in the SEC‑mandated quiet period ahead of its IPO. Companies are typically restricted from making statements that could be construed as promoting the offering outside the official prospectus. John Coates, former acting director of the SEC and now a professor at Harvard Law, told Reuters that the SEC "shows no apparent interest in enforcing quiet periods," effectively giving Musk a free hand.

But the contradiction creates a disclosure problem for SpaceX itself. The S‑1 filing is a legal document subject to securities laws. If the 180‑day base term is a material fact, its omission from the filing — combined with language strongly implying a multi‑year duration — could raise questions about the completeness of the registration statement, as Axios reported in its earlier coverage of the deal.

Anthropic declined to comment when contacted by reporters. SpaceX did not respond to multiple requests for clarification on the discrepancy, according to TechCrunch.

The deal centers on SpaceX's Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers, which together provide 300 megawatts of data center capacity in Memphis, Tennessee. The facilities are designed to host AI training and inference workloads at massive scale, with plans to eventually house 220,000 GB300 processors — advanced GB300 GPUs purpose‑built for large language model workloads, according to Data Center Dynamics.

At $1.25 billion per month for 300 MW, the implied rate works out to roughly $4.17 million per megawatt per month — a price that would make Colossus one of the most expensive data center leases in history, Axios noted. The premium reflects the scarcity of immediately available, AI‑ready power capacity at this scale, as well as Musk's willingness to charge market‑clearing prices for what amounts to a strategic bottleneck resource.

Musk's post that "the short term was our request" makes clear why: xAI, his own AI company, is expanding fast and may want the Colossus capacity back on short notice. A 180‑day lease with 90‑day cancellation gives SpaceX an off‑ramp that a 3‑year deal simply would not, the Financial Times reported.

For Anthropic, the ambiguity is itself a business risk. If Musk can terminate the lease with 90 days' notice after the initial 180 days, Anthropic would have to relocate training runs for models like Claude to alternative data centers — a process that could take months and disrupt product timelines, TechCrunch reported.

Anthropic has been racing to secure compute capacity amid an industry‑wide GPU shortage. The Colossus deal was seen as a major win — access to 300 MW of large‑scale AI infrastructure at a time when competitors are scrambling for any available capacity. But the revelation that the arrangement could dissolve in as little as six months changes the risk calculus for Anthropic's long‑term road map, according to Axios.

The situation highlights a broader vulnerability in the AI industry: frontier model developers are increasingly dependent on a small number of infrastructure providers, several of whom — like Musk's xAI — are also direct competitors. "The short term was our request, not Anthropic's" is not a comfort to anyone betting on Anthropic's multi‑year model development cycle, as France 24 noted.

The SpaceX-Anthropic contradiction fits into a larger narrative about AI infrastructure. The industry is in the midst of what many analysts describe as a speculative overbuild — tens of billions of dollars pouring into data center construction on the assumption that AI compute demand will continue its exponential trajectory. Q1 2026 losses of $2.5 billion on $818 million in revenue for SpaceX's AI segment suggest the economics are still deeply underwater, Reuters reported.

Musk has a well‑documented pattern of making public statements that diverge from formal corporate disclosures. During Tesla's 2018 "funding secured" episode, his tweets about taking the company private led to SEC sanctions. More recently, his public comments about xAI's capabilities and partnerships have occasionally differed from what official filings suggested, according to the Financial Times.

SpaceX's IPO is expected to be one of the largest in history, with the AI compute business positioned as a major growth narrative. The roadshow launches June 8, and the Anthropic deal terms — however they're ultimately characterized — will be a focal point for institutional investors trying to model the company's future cash flows. Whether the S‑1 gets amended before then to reflect Musk's own characterization of the deal remains an open question, France 24 reported.