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Image Credits:Cheng Xin / Getty Images9:51 AM PDT · June 22, 2026
First came Anthropic, past Google. Now, open-source AI startup Reflection is tapping SpaceX for its abundant root of AI chips.
Reflection AI volition wage $150 cardinal a period opening July 1, 2026 done 2029 for contiguous entree to Nvidia’s latest GB300 AI chips and supporting hardware crossed SpaceX’s Colossus 2 information halfway adjacent Memphis, Tennessee, the institution told TechCrunch. The woody is worthy up to $6.3 cardinal and either institution has the enactment to extremity the declaration with 90 days’ announcement aft the archetypal 3 months.
The woody is smaller than SpaceX’s deals with Anthropic and Google, which outgo the companies $1.25 cardinal per period and $920 cardinal per period respectively. Those contracts besides tally done July 2029, though Elon Musk has publicly downplayed the three-year term, emphasizing that the contracts tin beryllium cancelled astatine immoderate time.
Reflection utilized the compute woody — its archetypal — to tout the worth of its open-weight AI strategy, which it has pitched arsenic an open-source alternate to closed frontier labs similar Anthropic and OpenAI. Open-weight AI models, which publically merchandise their trained parameters, person received much attraction pursuing the U.S. government’s ban of Anthropic’s closed models, Fable and Mythos.
The startup, which was founded successful 2024 by 2 erstwhile Google DeepMind researchers, said the compute woody is 1 of the largest announced unfastened AI infrastructure commitments to date.
“Recent events item however important unfastened root is to the AI ecosystem, with much nations and enterprises recognizing the risks and costs associated with exclusively depending connected closed models,” a spokesperson said successful an emailed statement. “Our woody with SpaceXAI signals Reflection’s strategical value wrong the frontier AI ecosystem, and much compute means much runway to physique the world’s champion unfastened models astatine scale.”
The Colossus information halfway was primitively built by xAI, a institution founded by Elon Musk that is present portion pf SpaceX, for its ain AI efforts. As its interior pursuits person faltered, SpaceX leveraged its invaluable AI spot holdings and began renting them retired to immoderate of the world’s apical AI labs.
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Kirsten Korosec is simply a newsman and exertion who has covered the aboriginal of proscription from EVs and autonomous vehicles to municipality aerial mobility and in-car tech for much than a decade. She is presently the proscription exertion astatine TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is besides co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She antecedently wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive.
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