Market AnalysisJun 24, 20262 Min

SpaceX-Reflection AI $6.3 billion deal: What do the two companies gain?

SpaceX on Monday announced that it has signed a deal with artificial intelligence (AI) startup Reflection AI to rent out its data-centre capacity for three years.

As part of the agreement, SpaceX will grant Reflection access ‌to additional computing capacity at the ​Elon Musk-led company’s Colossus 2 data ⁠centre. This will give Reflection immediate access to Nvidia GB300s, the chips that are used to train advanced AI models.

Reflection has agreed to pay SpaceX $150 million per month beginning July 1, 2026, through 2029, according to a report by CNBC. This would total to about $6.3 billion if the agreement runs through the end of its term. Though the terms of the agreement said that either company can end the contract with 90 days’ notice after the first three months.

What does Reflection gain from this deal?

Reflection AI is a $25 billion-valuation startup building a network of open-source AI models. Open-weight AI models are those that publicly release their trained parameters. Such models have come in the limelight after the US government’s recent ban of Anthropic’s closed models, Fable and Mythos.

“Recent events highlight how important open source is to the AI ecosystem, with more nations and enterprises recognising the risks and costs associated with exclusively depending on closed models,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch.

“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.”

Reflection’s deal with SpaceX secures the GPU (graphics processing unit) capacity needed to train and serve frontier open-source AI models at a time when startups are struggling to acquire enough high-end Nvidia chips to compete with deep-pocketed incumbents.

How does SpaceX benefit from this deal?

The deal highlights the way SpaceX has been cashing on its massive data center build-out by selling computing power capacity to outside AI companies.

The company had originally built Colossus in part to power Musk’s AI chatbot Grok. Now, SpaceX has turned the facility into one of the largest third-party compute platforms in the world, with committed revenues from outside clients exceeding $80 billion through 2029.

Before Reflection, SpaceX had struck deals with Anthropic, Google and Cursor (which SpaceX is now acquiring) within a time span of two months.

Anthropic was signed on in May 2026 to rent all compute capacity at the original Colossus 1 facility in a deal valued at roughly $45 billion through mid-2029. Earlier this ⁠month, SpaceX announced that Google would pay the company $920 million a month from October this year to June 2029.

SpaceX is now also acquiring Cursor, the AI coding startup, which has been using Colossus infrastructure since April.

Notably, in January, Musk had announced that xAI purchased a third building in Memphis, expanding Colossus to 2 gigawatts total power capacity. The announcement mentioned that the facility would house 555,000 Nvidia GPUs purchased for approximately $18 billion—making it the world’s largest single-site AI training installation.