Data centre power is where Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture has started to wobble. SpaceX has rented out the supercomputers built to train its own Grok models to a direct rival, according to a newly filed stock market prospectus.

The filing showed that Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, will pay SpaceX US$1.25 billion a month to use the Colossus data centres in Memphis. Those are the same machines built to train Grok. Musk played the deal down as short-term and said SpaceX could take the capacity back if it needed to.

The numbers in the prospectus are not pretty. X merged with xAI last year, which folded the social platform’s losses into the AI accounts. Together the business lost US$6.4 billion on revenue of US$3.2 billion. More than 50 researchers and engineers have walked since SpaceX absorbed xAI in February, including people working on Grok’s coding and voice features.

Grok itself is now in its fourth generation. It runs inside X and competes with ChatGPT and Claude across text, images and video. It has won a Pentagon contract worth up to US$200 million alongside Google and OpenAI. It has also caused real headaches. The chatbot produced nonconsensual explicit deepfakes that spread across X, drawing investigations in the UK and EU and a police raid on the platform’s Paris office.

Colossus is a reminder of how much electricity frontier AI now swallows. The scramble for data centre power pushed xAI to install dozens of natural gas turbines just to run the Memphis site. Civil rights groups protested that they fouled the air in a mostly Black neighbourhood. The strain is no longer an American problem alone.

Malaysia is feeling the pull too. National utility Tenaga Nasional already supplies 36 operational data centres with planned capacity of nearly 4.5GW, and it expects data centres alone to draw more than 5GW by 2035. Industry voices have urged the government to be choosier about new projects, warning that electricity, water and land have to keep up.

Meta faces the same arithmetic on a far bigger scale. It has earmarked between US$125 billion and US$145 billion in capital spending this year, most of it on AI data centres. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told shareholders the company could end up selling cloud computing if it builds more capacity than it can use.

Musk asked for patience, pointing back to SpaceX’s own slow start. “SpaceX had achieved nothing of note after 3 years and was written off as dead after 6 years,” he wrote. His point was to judge xAI in three years, not now.

Data Centre Power Is The Real Cost Of The AI Race

SpaceX is chasing a valuation of as much as US$2 trillion in an IPO expected next month. Anthropic and OpenAI are lining up their own listings. The race will be won on models and money, but it also runs on power. In Malaysia that power comes off the national grid. Every new server hall approved is one more claim on electricity the country still has to build.

Sources: Free Malaysia Today | The Edge Malaysia

This article was drafted by URUS AI’s editorial system and reviewed by our editorial team. Source links are provided above.