Google rents computing power from SpaceX – $920 million per month

The agreement runs from October of this year to the end of June 2029. The contract grants Google access to 110,000 Nvidia graphics processors as well as processors, memory chips and other components. Compared with the performance of Nvidia's H200 chips, Google could draw on more than 100 megawatts of computing power.

Google has the right to terminate the contract with one month's notice should SpaceX fail to provide the computing power booked on Nvidia chips by September 30, 2026. The payment is therefore part of a cloud services agreement set to run from October 2026 to June 2029.

Connection to xAI and the chatbot Grok

Musk recently merged his own AI company "xAI" with SpaceX. At xAI and now SpaceX, the AI chatbot Grok is being developed, which is used less than OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's competing software Gemini. By renting out urgently needed computing power to Anthropic and Google, Musk is simultaneously helping those companies in their competition with rival OpenAI, with whom he has been feuding for years as a former co-founder.

SpaceX concluded a similar agreement with AI company Anthropic in early May 2026. In a comparable deal, AI company Anthropic is also obtaining computing power from SpaceX for $1.25 billion per month in a multi-year arrangement. Following the agreement with Anthropic announced a few weeks ago, he said that one of the data centers would be sufficient for SpaceX's AI activities.

Comparison with the Anthropic deal

xAI most recently invested billions in expanding computing power, for which several data centers were built. The Anthropic deal also fueled suspicion that the Colossus 1 data center belonging to xAI, which is part of SpaceX, had been oversized.

High investments and order backlog at Google

The latest quarterly report of Google's parent company Alphabet showed an order backlog of $460 billion for Google Cloud. These are contractually agreed services that have not yet been booked. Google alone has earmarked capital investments of up to $190 billion for this year, primarily for data centers.

IPO and financial figures of SpaceX

SpaceX wants to go public next week, targeting an overall valuation of $1.7 trillion as well as record revenues of $75 billion. Last year, the company posted a loss of around $4.94 billion on revenue of $18.67 billion. The rental of the data centers alone will significantly improve these figures.

Data centers in space as a long-term goal

Musk plans, in his own words, to build data centers in space in the medium term. With the leasing business, SpaceX is also positioning itself as a provider of AI infrastructure and taking on a key role in the race for the necessary computing capacities.

The news underscores the enormous importance that access to high-performance chips now has for the major tech corporations. While in-house investments in data centers take years, short-term rental agreements like the one with SpaceX can help to quickly bridge bottlenecks.

It is remarkable that Musk is simultaneously strengthening his former competitors with the deal. Google and Anthropic compete directly against Musk's own chatbot Grok in the AI market – and yet SpaceX supplies them with the necessary infrastructure.

The short-term nature of the contract indicates that Google is working toward its own capacities, which are to come online gradually over the coming years. Until then, the SpaceX agreement is meant to do one thing above all: cushion the supply bottlenecks for Nvidia GPUs.

Overall, the deal shows how the market for AI computing power is developing into a standalone business segment. Space companies like SpaceX are emerging in it as unexpected but financially powerful players.

This news was broadcast on June 6, 2026 on Deutschlandfunk. The underlying report comes from the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa).