We’re feeling cynical about xAI’s big deal with Anthropic

Anthropic and xAI announced a big partnership this week, with Anthropic buying all the compute capacity at xAI’s Colossus 1 data center in Tennessee.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed what the deal might mean for xAI’s parent company SpaceX, as SpaceX prepares to go public and apparently plans to dissolve xAI as a separate organization.

Kirsten did her best to offer “a positive view” on the partnership — after all, it’s a new way for xAI to make money. But she also noted that this also suggests xAI isn’t doing much when it comes to training its own frontier AI models, and it’s harder for the company to position itself as a “forward-looking, innovative” business when that’s the case.

Then Sean asked: “Why be positive when you can be cynical?” In his view, this seems like “a major heat check before the IPO.” Yes, becoming a neocloud might be “a more believable business in the near term,” but it’s less likely to get outside investors excited in the long term. (And then there’s the environmental lawsuit that xAI is facing over Colossus 1.)

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Sean O’Kane: I always love a surprise, especially when everybody’s eyes [are] on another ball, a major trial that’s happening. Seemingly out of nowhere this week, SpaceX and therefore its AI subsidiary xAI — which apparently no longer exists now, or is imminently not about to exist, which we can get to — struck a deal with Anthropic.

Basically, the real version of the deal is that Anthropic’s essentially taking over all of the compute at the data center known as Colossus 1 in Memphis, Tennessee, to focus on Anthropic’s more enterprise-focused AI products. There’s been a lot of reporting about how [Anthropic’s] been looking for more compute […] and it seems like an escape valve for them to be able to strike this deal and get access to all this compute.

In the near term, for xAI and for SpaceX, yes, they are a neocloud now, in the sense that they had to do something with all this compute that they were building, because it certainly seems like they were not going to need it for Grok — which, outside of X, is not burning up the world as far as becoming the new hot consumer chat bot.

Kirsten Korosec: And we should say that in terms of what a neocloud is, for those who don’t know, this is the idea of buying GPUs from Nvidia and the like, and renting those out as opposed to using those for their own AI, training their own AI models.

So this is a different kind of business, and the point that our AI editor, Russell Brandom, makes is that a lot of companies are building out data centers, but if given a choice between, do they rent them out [or using them to train their own models], they are still prioritizing using this compute for their own internal AI model training. I think that’s an important point and one that suggests that maybe xAI isn’t doing so much on the AI model training [side]

Anthony Ha: Right, and as Sean was alluding to, most people would not necessarily think of Grok as — not only that it’s known for some pretty unpleasant, if not downright illegal, content, but also it’s not necessarily super cutting edge. Especially if we start talking about enterprise AI, which I know we’re gonna be getting into later in this episode, you don’t hear a lot about people using Grok for work-critical tasks. 

And so the question becomes: How can xAI actually make money? And apparently just selling the infrastructure could be one of the main ways to do it.

Kirsten: And you could take a positive view on that, right? They figured out a way to make money. But I think that when you are positioning your company — in this case, SpaceX-slash-xAI — as a forward-looking, innovative company, that’s tougher to sell if you are simply just renting out your GPUs and not using them for that innovation.

Sean: But why be positive when you can be cynical? Which is to say that this seems like a major heat check before the IPO that we’re about to see get rammed into the markets with SpaceX.

Anthony, you mentioned not only is Grok not being used for big enterprise tasks, there’s been reporting that xAI employees were using other models, they weren’t even using [Grok] internally, and that caused this big shakeup inside of xAI, post acquisition from SpaceX, that involved essentially all the co-founders leaving other than Elon Musk, [and] him basically saying he’s starting from scratch on xAI, despite the fact that SpaceX paid $250 billion for it in the run up to this mega-IPO. 

And now he’s saying that they’re going to dissolve xAI as a separate entity inside SpaceX altogether. He’s starting to call the whole thing SpaceXAI, because this man loves nothing but to ruin a brand that has some value to it — see Twitter.

This may be a more believable business in the near term, and so on some level, I could see this being maybe more attractive to investors come IPO time, because it’s like a bit more reliable and certainly more real than them being a frontier lab developer. But it’s also not the kind of business that’s going to draw the same — at least, in a normal environment — outside investment that we’re seeing go into all the frontier labs.

That’s maybe one of the biggest tension points we’ve seen develop during this IPO process.