First came anthropicso Google. Now, open source AI startup Reflection is turning to SpaceX for its abundant source of AI chips.
Reflection AI will pay $150 million a month from July 1, 2026 through 2029 for immediate access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 AI chips and supporting hardware at 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 terminate 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 a month and $920 million a month, respectively. Those contracts also extend until July 2029, although Elon Musk has publicly downplayed the three-year term, emphasizing that contracts can be canceled at any time.
Reflection used the IT deal (its first) to promote the value of your open weight AI strategywhich it has pitched as an open source alternative to closed-frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. Open weight AI models, which publicly publish their trained parameters, have received more attention after the The US government’s ban or the closed models of Anthropic, Fable and Mythos.
The startup, founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers, said the computing deal is one of the largest open AI infrastructure commitments announced to date.
“Recent developments highlight how important open source is to the AI ecosystem, with more nations and companies recognizing the risks and costs associated with relying exclusively on closed models,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Our agreement with SpaceXAI signals the strategic importance of Reflection within the cutting-edge AI ecosystem, and more computing means more runways to build the world’s best open models at scale.”
He Colossus data center It 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 goals failed, SpaceX took advantage of its valuable AI chips and began leasing them to some of the world’s top AI labs.
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