Open source AI startup Reflection AI has agreed to pay SpaceX $150 million per month for access to Nvidia GB300 chips and supporting hardware at SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, Tennessee. The contract begins July 1, 2026, runs through 2029, and is valued at up to $6.3 billion. Either party can exit the agreement with 90 days’ notice after the first three months.
The deal is Reflection’s first compute contract and is smaller than SpaceX’s existing agreements with Anthropic and Google, which cost those companies $1.25 billion and $920 million per month, respectively. Both of those contracts also run through July 2029.
Reflection AI was founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers. The company develops open-weight AI models — models that publicly release their trained parameters — and has positioned itself as an alternative to closed frontier labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
The company cited the U.S. government’s ban of Anthropic’s closed models, Fable and Mythos, as context for growing interest in open-weight approaches. “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,” a Reflection spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch.
The Colossus 2 data center was originally built by xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, which is now part of SpaceX. As xAI’s internal AI efforts have slowed, SpaceX has begun leasing its chip capacity to outside AI labs, with Anthropic and Google signing on before Reflection.
Reflection described the deal as one of the largest announced open AI infrastructure commitments to date, suggesting the agreement may signal broader industry movement toward open-weight model development.
Source: TechCrunch