SpaceX to Lease AI Compute Power to Reflection AI in Multi-Billion Dollar Deal SpaceX’s latest move to rent out its vast AI data-center capacity has drawn an open‑source upstart, Reflection AI, into the same high‑stakes compute market as tech giants — intensifying questions over who controls the hardware that powers cutting‑edge AI.

Early June 2026: Deal terms emerge

News first surfaced that Reflection AI, an Nvidia‑backed open‑source lab, had secured a major compute agreement with SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, Tennessee. Under the deal, Reflection will gain access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 AI chips and supporting hardware across the facility, with payments of $150 million per month starting July 1, 2026 and running through 2029.

Reports quickly converged on the scale of the arrangement. Reflection will pay SpaceX $150 million a month to rent Nvidia chips at Colossus 2, a package worth roughly $6.3 billion by 2029. The Verge framed it simply: “SpaceX is leasing AI compute to Reflection, too,” noting that the agreement mirrors similar long‑term rentals SpaceX has struck with Anthropic and Google.

Mid–late June 2026: Strategic context and overlapping roles

Axios highlighted that the deal gives Reflection “immediate access to chips and hardware from the SpaceX Colossus 2 data center” and could help open‑source AI companies compete with frontier labs by expanding training compute. The outlet emphasized that both Anthropic and Google are already expected to spend billions for access to Elon Musk’s compute infrastructure, underscoring how “the AI boom’s biggest players are increasingly investors, suppliers and customers to one another, often all at the same time.”

The Next Web stressed that Nvidia sits “on both sides of the trade”: it both manufactures the chips powering Colossus 2 and invested about $800 million in Reflection, helping fund the very customer now leasing Nvidia hardware from SpaceX. That circular financing, it noted, is becoming typical as “money and silicon flow between a small group of firms.”

TechCrunch, meanwhile, framed the agreement as another step in SpaceX’s evolution into a “compute landlord” and as a pivotal resource boost for Reflection’s stated goal of building open‑source “open weights” models that can rival closed systems from OpenAI and Anthropic.

[1] Axios — “Nvidia-backed Reflection lands SpaceX compute deal”
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/22/open-source-ai-gets-more-compute-from-spacex

[2] TechCrunch — “SpaceX inks compute deal with Reflection AI, an open source AI lab”
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/22/spacex-inks-compute-deal-with-reflection-ai-an-open-source-ai-lab/

[3] The Next Web — “SpaceX Reflection AI deal: $6.3bn for compute”
https://thenextweb.com/news/spacex-reflection-ai-6-3bn-compute-deal

[4] The Verge — “SpaceX is leasing AI compute to Reflection, too.”
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/953910/spacex-is-leasing-ai-compute-to-reflection-too

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