Elon Musk now literally holds the off switch on Anthropic's $2 trillion IPO.
Anthropic's filing shows it has agreed to pay Elon's AI company up to $120.5 billion for computing power. And starting early next year, either side can walk away with 90 days' notice.
The deal is with SpaceXAI, the SpaceX unit that used to be xAI, and it rents Anthropic the Nvidia chips that run Claude.
In May, the price was $1.25 billion a month for one data center in Memphis. Reuters reported the confidential draft of this filing put the total at $84.5 billion. The public version filed today says $120.5 billion.
Once all the capacity arrives in December, the bill jumps: Anthropic expects to pay Musk about $3.1 billion every month.
Anthropic reportedly brought in $16.8 billion last quarter, which works out to about $5.6 billion a month. So more than HALF of what Anthropic earns today is about to go to one supplier.
Now here's where it gets really insane:
The lock-in on those contracts ends in January and March 2027. After that, either side can cancel with 90 days' notice. Fortune reported in July that the clause gives SpaceX a way to take its chips back if Grok suddenly needs more.
Grok competes directly with Claude.
And in February, Elon publicly called Anthropic's AI evil.
So the company selling itself to the public as the safe AI lab is about to run a huge share of its product on hardware owned by its loudest critic. That critic also owns a direct competitor, and he can start the 90-day clock in early 2027.
The filing does warn that some of Anthropic's compute suppliers build their own AI models, and that warning reads very differently once the supplier is Elon.
And Elon needs this deal just as badly: SpaceX's CFO has promised $100 billion in annual revenue by the end of this year. At full speed, Anthropic's rent comes to about $9.3 billion a quarter. That's more than the roughly $7.6 billion SpaceX's entire AI business brought in last quarter.
So 2 of the biggest IPOs in history are now holding each other up, and both of them have a 90-day exit.
Anthropic has a real argument here. Computing power is the scarcest thing in AI right now, and Amazon's cloud capacity for 2027 is reportedly largely sold out. The filing even admits Anthropic badly underestimated how much compute it needed in the past. Grabbing every chip on the market is the rational move, and the same clause lets Anthropic leave if cheaper capacity shows up.
But public buyers deserve 2 things before the listing: Anthropic should publish how much of Claude runs on SpaceX hardware and what happens to its customers if that notice ever arrives. And it should get the 90-day exit removed for the full length of the contract, the same way its other big compute bills are locked in.
Until then, anyone buying ANT at $2 trillion has to answer one question for themselves:
Who do they trust to keep Claude running in 2027, Anthropic or Elon Musk?
Anthropic has filed an S-1 registration statement with the SEC related to its proposed IPO.
Read more:
anthropic.com/news/s1-sec
Legal disclaimer: A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This post does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.