SpaceX has signed a multibillion-dollar deal to rent its AI computing power to Reflection, an open-source AI startup. Under the agreement, Reflection will pay SpaceX 150 million dollars per month starting July 1, 2026 and running through 2029, which adds up to about 6.3 billion dollars if it runs the full term. In return, Reflection gets immediate access to Nvidia GB300s, the top-of-the-line chips used to train and run advanced models, housed at SpaceX's Colossus 2 facility in Memphis, Tennessee.
The deal is a marker of what SpaceX is becoming. It built the Colossus data centers in part to power Grok, Musk's AI chatbot and rival to ChatGPT, but after the company's record initial public offering it is now monetizing that build-out by selling compute capacity to outside AI companies. SpaceX has already struck computing deals with Google and others, and it is in the process of acquiring the coding startup Cursor. Reflection is the latest tenant in what is quickly turning into a merchant compute business.
For Reflection, the logic is straightforward. It is an open-source lab founded by former DeepMind researchers and backed by Nvidia, and the scarce input it needs is guaranteed access to frontier chips. Locking in a fleet of GB300s for three years removes the single biggest bottleneck for a lab that trains its own models, and the contract lets either side walk away with 90 days notice after the first three months, so the commitment is real without being a trap.
Step back and the deal says something about the shape of the AI race. Compute is the currency, and whoever owns the data centers can rent to everyone, including potential rivals. By turning Colossus into capacity it sells, SpaceX puts Musk in the same position as the big cloud providers, an arms dealer to the whole field, with the IPO cash to keep building. The buyers are no longer just the hyperscalers, they are well-funded labs that would rather rent guaranteed chips than wait in line for them.
The honest caveat is in the fine print. The 6.3 billion dollar figure assumes the contract runs its full term, and the 90 day exit clause means it is better read as recurring monthly revenue than a locked sum. There is also something pointed about SpaceX renting frontier compute to an independent lab while building its own model on the same machines. But the signal is hard to miss. The binding constraint in AI is increasingly power, chips, and data centers, and that is now a market SpaceX is selling into, one tenant at a time.