Colossus 2 Makes SpaceX the Biggest Landlord in AI, at $2.17 Billion a Month on 90-Day Leases
Google and Anthropic will hand SpaceX $26 billion a year to rent Memphis compute, and either tenant can give back the keys on a quarter's notice.
Colossus 2 came online in Memphis last week, and SpaceX now runs the largest AI data center anybody has built. Google starts paying rent inside it in October. Anthropic has been renting the building next door since May. Once both meters run together, a rocket company becomes the biggest landlord in artificial intelligence, on lease terms that would make an actual landlord spit their coffee out.
The $2.17 billion rent roll under Colossus 2
Anthropic took the whole thing first. In May it signed for the full capacity of Colossus 1, which Anthropic described as more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and 300 megawatts of new capacity in Memphis. The rent is $1.25 billion a month. It runs through May 2029, which adds up to about $45 billion of compute.
$GOOGL signed a month later for roughly 110,000 GPUs. Its rent is $920 million a month once the capacity is fully delivered. The term runs 32 months, from October 2026 out to June 2029, and totals about $30 billion. Google's been ramping into the space at a discounted fee all summer, and the full rate starts in October. Google's said they needed bridge capacity, because Gemini Enterprise demand ran past what it planned for while it keeps building its own TPUs. The company with its own chips and its own data centers is renting Nvidia racks from Elon for 32 months.
So next month both meters run at once and $SPCX collects $2.17 billion. Then it does that again every month after. Call it $26 billion a year of rent, invoiced by a company that sells rocket launches.
The scale only lands if you look at what this business earned before the leases. SpaceX's AI segment (the old xAI, folded in and now reported as SpaceXAI) booked $818 million of revenue in the March quarter. It lost $2.47 billion from operations earning it. One month of the October rent roll is bigger than that whole quarter of revenue. (This is the same company that went public on Nasdaq at $135 a share in June, on a story that was mostly rockets and Starlink.)
Ninety days' notice is doing all the work
Either side can walk away from the Anthropic contract with 90 days' notice. Google negotiated the same escape hatch, and it opens after December 31, 2026.
Google also wrote in a delivery test. If SpaceX hasn't handed over the committed GPU count by September 30, Google can terminate after a one-month grace period or keep fewer chips at a pro rata fee cut. That's three weeks away, and it lands before the first full-rate invoice.
The $45 billion and the $30 billion are headline numbers wrapped around agreements that go close to month-to-month by spring. A tenant paying for a quarter's notice is buying optionality, and the landlord is carrying the $35.8 billion Colossus 2 cost to build. (The Anthropic contract also lets SpaceX claw the compute back if Anthropic's AI "does something that harms humanity," a clause that's either the most consequential sentence in AI infrastructure or one a lawyer wrote to be quoted. Probably both.)
The power bill nobody can cancel
Colossus 2 pulls about 946 megawatts of IT load, which is what puts it ahead of every other site on earth. It got there on gas turbines trucked in across the Mississippi state line, because the grid wasn't going to arrive on Elon Musk's schedule. xAI also built its own 150 megawatt substation in Memphis. That took 97 days, against the two and a half years a utility normally spends.
Those temporary turbines are on the way out. SpaceX agreed to pull them as a permanent 1.2 gigawatt plant comes up, with a hard deadline of July 2027 to clear the site. The permanent plant runs on 41 turbines permitted in March 2026 under the Clean Air Act. None of that construction slows down if a tenant gives notice.
Who books revenue whichever tenant stays
Solaris Energy Infrastructure gets paid either way. It's a NYSE-listed turbine fleet operator that leases generation to sites which can't wait in a utility queue, and its second-quarter revenue came in at $219.4 million. That's up 47% from a year earlier. Management expanded three long-term contracts in the quarter, adding more than $100 million of expected annual adjusted EBITDA, one of them a turnkey 660 megawatt plant designed for AI workloads. The xAI roadmap alone calls for at least 1.1 gigawatts of Solaris turbines in service by 2027. (Nobody's cancelling a gas plant on 90 days' notice, which is a nice property in a business where the tenants can.)
$NVDA has the same shape of exposure, booked on GPUs already installed and paid for. The compute lease is the layer that can vanish in a quarter. The electrons and the silicon underneath it are sold forward. For how the same rent shows up on the tenant's side of the ledger, see our earlier coverage of where Anthropic's $135 billion of compute leases actually land.
Colossus 2 is the biggest AI data center in the world and as of next month it's fully leased at $2.17 billion a month. Both leases go month-to-month before the turbines under them are even permanent.