TechCrunch reported on Tuesday that xAI, led by Elon Musk, and AI company Anthropic announced a partnership under which Anthropic will take all computing capacity at xAI’s Colossus 1 data centre.

Anthropic, which secured about 300 MW of computing capacity, can immediately increase usage of its Claude service. TechCrunch said the deal, estimated at several billion dollars, gives xAI a foothold to monetise Colossus 1, which had been left idle after it moved training work to Colossus 2.

Musk explained that xAI decided to provide it to Anthropic because it had already moved its training infrastructure to a new data centre and did not need both sites.

Usage of xAI’s Grok model fell sharply after an image-generation controversy earlier this year. TechCrunch said selling computing to Anthropic would improve the company’s financial statements, as the data centre is far larger than what is needed to run Grok.

More broadly, the partnership suggests xAI’s actual business direction may be closer to building data centres than training AI models, TechCrunch said.

TechCrunch said Google and Meta have chosen to keep computing as a strategic asset in-house, but xAI is pursuing a neo-cloud business model in which it buys GPUs from Nvidia and leases them to model developers such as Anthropic.