SpaceX inks compute deal with Reflection AI, an open source AI lab
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- Reflection AI will pay SpaceX $150 million per month from July 1, 2026 through 2029 for immediate access to Nvidia GB300 AI chips and supporting hardware at the Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, Tennessee.
- The deal is worth up to $6.3 billion, with either party able to terminate the contract with 90 days' notice after the first three months.
- The contract is SpaceX's third major AI compute deal and is smaller than its existing agreements with Anthropic ($1.25 billion/month) and Google ($920 million/month), all of which also run through July 2029.
- Founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers, Reflection framed the agreement as one of the largest announced open AI infrastructure commitments to date.
- The startup used the deal to promote its open-weight AI strategy as an alternative to closed frontier labs, citing the U.S. government's ban of Anthropic's closed models Fable and Mythos.
- SpaceX's Colossus data center was originally built by xAI (now part of SpaceX) for its own AI efforts before SpaceX began renting out its chip holdings to external AI labs.
Why it matters: Reflection becomes SpaceX's third publicly confirmed Colossus tenant, joining Anthropic and Google. The startup, founded in 2024, is betting that securing the same Nvidia GB300 access as closed-lab rivals is essential to validate open-weight models as a viable frontier alternative — and it's paying $150M/month to make that case.
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