SpaceX has signed another major compute deal, this time with Reflection AI, an open-source AI startup founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers. As reported by TechCrunch, the deal is worth up to $6.3 billion and gives Reflection immediate access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 AI chips at SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, Tennessee.
Reflection will pay $150 million per month starting July 1, 2026, through 2029. Either side can walk away with 90 days’ notice after the first three months. This is Reflection’s first major compute deal, and the company says it’s one of the largest infrastructure commitments made by an open AI lab to date.
The deal is smaller than what SpaceX has already arranged with Anthropic and Google, which pay $1.25 billion and $920 million per month respectively for access to the same data center. Those contracts also run through July 2029. Elon Musk has downplayed the three-year length of these agreements in public, pointing to the cancellation clause as evidence they’re not as binding as they appear.
Reflection’s pitch is simple: it wants to be the open-source alternative to labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. Unlike those companies, Reflection publicly releases its model weights, meaning anyone can inspect, download, and build on top of its AI systems. That approach has gained more attention lately after the U.S. government banned Anthropic’s closed models, Fable and Mythos, pushing more developers and governments toward open alternatives.
In a statement, a Reflection spokesperson said: “Recent events highlight how important open source is to the AI ecosystem, with more nations and enterprises recognizing the risks and costs associated with exclusively depending on closed models. Our deal with SpaceXAI signals Reflection’s strategic importance within the frontier AI ecosystem, and more compute means more runway to build the world’s best open models at scale.”
The Colossus data center has an interesting backstory. It was originally built by xAI, Musk’s AI company, which is now folded into SpaceX. As xAI’s own AI efforts have lost momentum, SpaceX has turned the facility into a revenue source by renting out its chip capacity to outside labs. Anthropic and Google were the first major tenants. Reflection is now the third.
This pattern matters beyond the deal itself. SpaceX is quietly becoming a major player in AI infrastructure, not by building AI products, but by controlling access to the hardware that makes those products possible. With compute still scarce and Nvidia’s latest chips in high demand, whoever holds the chips holds real power in the AI market. That gives SpaceX a strong position regardless of how its own AI ambitions play out.
For Reflection, the access to GB300 chips is a significant step up. Training frontier AI models requires enormous amounts of compute, and startups typically struggle to get access to the latest hardware at scale. Locking in three years of capacity, even with an exit clause, gives the company the stability it needs to compete with much larger, better-funded labs.
