Anthropic has dramatically expanded its infrastructure footprint with two major deals that position the AI company to surpass OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation, intensifying the race for enterprise AI dominance and raising fresh questions about the future of Elon Musk’s xAI as parent company SpaceX nears an IPO.
The first arrangement, reported on May 10, sees Anthropic taking over all compute capacity at xAI’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. The facility houses over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and will effectively become a dedicated infrastructure provider for Anthropic’s Claude models. The deal marks a striking pivot for xAI, which had originally positioned itself as a frontier AI lab rivaling OpenAI. Instead of training its own models like Grok, xAI is now operating as a “neocloud”—buying Nvidia hardware and leasing it out. As BitcoinWorld senior editor Anthony Ha and transportation reporter Kirsten Korosec noted on the Equity podcast, this model generates steady revenue but weakens xAI’s innovative narrative. Korosec said, “When you are positioning your company as a forward-looking, innovative company, that’s tougher to sell if you are simply just renting out your GPUs.”
Only a day later, on May 11, it emerged that Anthropic signed a $1.8 billion cloud infrastructure contract with Akamai—the largest customer deal in Akamai’s history—to last seven years. Akamai CEO Frank Thomson Leighton described the partner as a “leading frontier model company.” This adds to Anthropic’s existing capacity agreements with AWS, Google, CoreWeave, and the SpaceXAI-linked Colossus 1. The Akamai deal focuses on distributed compute using Nvidia Blackwell RTX Pro 6000 Server Edition clusters, supporting agentic AI workloads at the edge.
The flurry of infrastructure moves comes as Anthropic is reportedly seeking a $50 billion private funding round that could value it between $900 billion and $1 trillion, potentially topping OpenAI’s March 2026 valuation. Anthropic’s valuation has rocketed from $61.5 billion in March 2025 to $380 billion by February 2026, fueled by enterprise adoption of Claude Code and Cowork. Annualized revenue run rate estimates range from $30 billion to $45 billion, outpacing OpenAI’s $25 billion.
For SpaceX, which plans to absorb xAI and go public, the Anthropic partnership is seen as a “heat check” to assure IPO investors of a clear monetization path, despite internal xAI struggles—most co-founders have left and employees were reported to favor rival AI models over Grok. Meanwhile, European regulators are scrutinizing both Anthropic and OpenAI under the EU AI Act, adding a regulatory dimension to the competition.
The combined deals underscore a broader industry shift: compute infrastructure itself is now a prized standalone asset, and Anthropic is leveraging it aggressively to meet enterprise demand while its frontier rivals grapple with capex and innovation pressures.
