SpaceX Inks strikes computing deal with Reflection AI, an open source artificial intelligence lab

First came Anthropology, then Google. Now, AI startup Reflection is tapping SpaceX for its abundant source of AI chips.

Reflection AI will pay $150 million per month from July 1, 2026 through 2029 for immediate access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 AI chips and supporting hardware via SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, Tennessee, the company told TechCrunch. The deal is worth up to $6.3 billion, and both companies have the option to terminate the contract with 90 days’ notice after the first three months.

This 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. These contracts also run until July 2029, although Elon Musk has publicly downplayed the three-year period, stressing that the contracts can be canceled at any time.

Reflection used the computing deal — its first — to tout the value of its open-weight AI strategy, which it pitched as an open-source alternative to closed frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. Open-weighted AI models, which publicly publish their trained benchmarks, have received more attention following the US government’s ban on Anthropic’s closed models, Fable and Mythos.

The startup, which was founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers, said the computing deal is one of the largest open AI infrastructure commitments announced to date.

“Recent events highlight how important open source is to the AI ​​ecosystem, with more countries and companies realizing the risks and costs associated with relying exclusively on closed models,” a company spokesperson said in an email statement. “Our deal with SpaceXAI signals the strategic importance of Reflection 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 of SpaceX, for its own AI efforts. As its internal endeavors faltered, SpaceX leveraged its valuable holdings of AI chips and began leasing them to some of the world’s top AI labs.