Musk Collects R40 Billion A Month In AI Rent From Google And Anthropic

Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for compute. Google pays $920 million. Combined, the two AI leases are worth more than SpaceX entire 2025 revenue. Musk is the landlord of the AI race.

Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion (R22.9 billion) every month for three years to rent GPU capacity at the Colossus 1 datacentre in Memphis, Tennessee. The deal, signed in May, gives Anthropic access to more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and over 300 megawatts of compute, which is roughly the power draw of a small city.

Google signed its own lease weeks later. The search giant will pay SpaceX $920 million (R16.8 billion) a month starting October, for roughly 110,000 GPUs, running through June 2029. Combined, the two contracts are worth $2.17 billion (R39.7 billion) a month, or about $26 billion (R476 billion) a year, which is more than SpaceX's entire 2025 revenue of $18.67 billion (R341.7 billion), according to the company's S-1 filing.

One tenant, paying monthly rent, nearly matching the whole company's annual turnover.

(Landlord of the year, frankly.)

Both companies are paying for infrastructure that was built for xAI, Musk's AI venture, which SpaceX acquired in February in an all-stock deal valued at roughly $1.25 trillion (R22.9 trillion). The merged entity went public in June at $1.77 trillion (R32.4 trillion), closing its first day of trading above $2.1 trillion (R38.4 trillion) on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. It was the largest IPO in history.

SpaceX builds the datacentres, AI companies pay rent on them, and the rent now exceeds every other revenue line the company has. Starlink, the satellite internet business that was SpaceX's main income source, generated $11.4 billion (R208.6 billion) in 2025. The two AI leases will generate more than double that, annually, from two customers alone.

The deals exist because the AI industry has run into a wall that money alone cannot fix: there are not enough chips, power, or datacentres on Earth to meet demand. Anthropic needs the capacity for its Claude models. Google needs what it calls "bridge capacity" for Gemini Enterprise, its agentic AI platform, which has grown faster than even Google's own infrastructure can handle.

In January, SpaceX filed an application with the US Federal Communications Commission for permission to launch and operate up to one million satellites as part of its Orbital Data Center system, internally called Starmind. The AI1 satellite design features a 70-metre wingspan and a 150-kilowatt peak compute payload, with interchangeable hardware for different processors. Musk has said he wants to begin launching them by 2028, using Starship, and has described space as "the only way to scale AI."

The rationale is uninterruptible solar power and lower cooling costs, the two biggest operating expenses for Earth-based datacentres. Nvidia has already built a chip for this. The Space-1 Vera Rubin Module, announced at GTC 2026, is designed to deliver datacentre-class AI compute in space, with up to 25 times the AI compute power per GPU compared with the H100. It is expected to be available in 2027.

Whether the orbital datacentres arrive on schedule is a separate question (they will not). The Earth-based revenue is already real. Anthropic's contract alone could generate more than $40 billion (R732 billion) over its three-year term. Google's deal adds another $30 billion (R549 billion) if it runs to completion. The termination clauses are loose: Google can exit with 90 days' notice after December, and Anthropic's ramp-up period has already passed.

Musk, in other words, has found a way to charge rent to the companies building the future.

Whoever's model wins, Claude or Gemini or his own Grok, the landlord gets paid.

[Sources: Tom's Hardware, Anthropic, Teslarati & FCC]