SpaceX inks compute deal with Reflection AI, an open-source AI lab
Quick Answer
SpaceX has secured a $150 million monthly deal with Reflection AI, starting July 1, 2026, for access to Nvidia's GB300 AI chips at its Colossus 2 data center.
Quick Take
This partnership will span until 2029, enhancing Reflection AI's capabilities with cutting-edge hardware.
Key Points
- Reflection AI will pay $150 million monthly for Nvidia's GB300 AI chips.
- The deal begins on July 1, 2026, and lasts until 2029.
- Access is provided through SpaceX's Colossus 2 data center in Tennessee.
- This partnership aims to enhance Reflection AI's hardware capabilities.
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readFirst came Anthropic, then Google. Now, open source AI startup Reflection is tapping SpaceX for its abundant source of AI chips.
Reflection AI will pay $150 million a month beginning 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 company told TechCrunch. The deal is worth up to $6.3 billion and either company has the option to end the contract with 90 days’ notice after the first three months.
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. Those contracts also run through July 2029, although Elon Musk has publicly downplayed the three-year term, emphasizing that the contracts can be canceled at any time.
Reflection used the compute deal — its first — to tout the value of its open-weight AI strategy, which it has pitched as an open source alternative to closed frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. Open-weight AI models, which publicly release their trained parameters, have received more attention following the U.S. government’s ban of Anthropic’s closed models, Fable and Mythos.
The startup, which was founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers, said the compute deal is one of the largest announced open AI infrastructure commitments to date.
“Recent events highlight how important open source is to the AI ecosystem, with more nations and enterprises recognizing the risks and costs associated with exclusively depending on closed models,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Our deal with SpaceXAI signals Reflection’s strategic importance within the frontier AI ecosystem, and more compute means more 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 that is now part pf SpaceX, for its own AI efforts. As its internal pursuits have faltered, SpaceX leveraged its valuable AI chip holdings and began renting them out to some of the world’s top AI labs.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive.
You can contact or verify outreach from Kirsten by emailing kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at kkorosec.07 on Signal.
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
Want this in your inbox every morning?
Daily brief at your local 8am — bilingual EN/中文, free.
More from TechCrunch
See more →
AI chip startup Etched defies skeptics, hits $10.3B valuation from big-name investors
AI chip startup Etched has achieved a $10.3 billion valuation after a $300 million Series C funding round, led by Sequoia and supported by notable investors like Andreessen Horowitz. The company claims to have developed innovative low-voltage chips for AI inference, significantly enhancing performance and reducing costs, with $1 billion in orders already booked.
