SpaceX owns one of Anthropic's biggest rivals. It just sold Anthropic all of the chips at one of its data sites anyway.
That tells you how tight chips are right now.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the firm planned for 10-fold growth this year. Use and sales grew 80-fold in Q1 on a yearly pace.
That's why Claude has been slow at peak hours, Amodei told coders Wednesday at his San Francisco event. He said the pace is "just crazy" and "too hard to handle."
His ask for the rest of the year was "more normal" growth. He told the room Anthropic is working as fast as it can to add more chips.
Coders have been the first to pile in. They use the firm's coding tool Claude Code, which came out last year.
Amodei said that early use is "a foreshadowing." The same shift will hit the rest of the work world soon, he said.
The SpaceX deal hands Anthropic more than 300 megawatts at the Colossus 1 site in Memphis. That's enough power to run a small city.
SpaceX also owns xAI, the AI lab now called SpaceXAI. So Anthropic is buying from a parent firm that runs one of its rivals.
The deal is the latest in a long string. Last month, Anthropic locked in a multi-billion dollar pact with Amazon.
Anthropic said in April that Claude demand has caused "inevitable strain" on its tools. That strain has hit speed and uptime at peak hours.
Anthropic is in talks with backers to raise cash at a $900 billion price tag, CNBC has said. That would make it worth more than OpenAI on paper.
The growth has not been slowed by Washington. The Pentagon called Anthropic a supply chain risk in March. It blocked the firm from work with the U.S. military.
That fight is still in the courts. Anthropic has stayed on offense in the meantime.
The firm has signed more deals, raised more money, and chased its own demand. It is now a top tool inside large code shops, where sales have scaled fastest.
The new SpaceX deal also came with a clear note from Amodei to coders. More chips are on the way, he said, and Anthropic will pass them on as soon as it can.
Coders use Claude Code to write, test, and ship code faster. The tool has spread fast inside large software teams.
Each new team adds more hits to the same chip pool. That is why the strain has hit speed and uptime.
The new 300 megawatts will help, but only if it comes online fast. Backers are watching for that.
Amodei has now tied the chip crunch to the same surge that is pushing the price tag higher. Backers will watch if the new SpaceX power makes Claude faster.
Anthropic just locked up another 300 megawatts from SpaceX. The next round of cash talks may start soon.