Reflection AI will pay SpaceX $150mn a month for Nvidia chips at Colossus 2, a deal worth roughly $6.3bn by 2029. The SpaceX Reflection AI deal puts Nvidia on both sides of the trade.
SpaceX has signed another giant compute tenant. This time it is Reflection AI, an open-source startup barely two years old.
Reflection will pay $150mn a month to rent Nvidia chips at Colossus 2, SpaceX’s data centre in Memphis. The payments run from 1 July 2026 through 2029, and add up to about $6.3bn, according to CNBC.
The Information first reported the deal. Either side can walk away with 90 days’ notice after the first three months, and the compute runs on Nvidia’s latest GB300 systems.
Nvidia is on both sides
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The structure is unusual. Nvidia makes the chips that power the deal, and it is also an investor in Reflection.
Nvidia put around $800mn into the startup last year, Tech Funding News reported. So the same company supplies the hardware and helps fund the customer that rents it.
That circularity is becoming common in the AI buildout. Money and silicon flow between a small group of firms. The same names keep appearing on both sides of each contract.
Who Reflection is
Reflection was founded in 2024 by Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou. Both came from Google DeepMind, where Antonoglou helped build AlphaGo.
The startup raised $2bn last October at an $8bn valuation, with Nvidia, Sequoia and Lightspeed backing it. It is now raising again at a $25bn valuation, Bloomberg reported.
Reflection has not shipped a public frontier model yet. Its pitch is open weights, a deliberate contrast to closed labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
“More compute means more runway to build the world’s best open models at scale,” the company said. It frames the work as “American open intelligence”. The startup also has ties to the Energy Department’s Genesis Mission and Pentagon AI projects.
SpaceX is now a compute landlord
SpaceX built Colossus for xAI’s Grok. It has since turned the site into a rental business. That is partly because it could not make the data centre work for its own models.
Reflection is the latest tenant in a fast-growing list. SpaceX already rents capacity to Anthropic for about $1.25bn a month and to Google for $920mn a month.
It is also moving up the stack. SpaceX has an option to buy the AI coding startup Cursor for $60bn after its record IPO.
Together, those contracts give SpaceX more than $80bn in committed compute revenue through 2029, according to Tech Funding News.
Inside Colossus 2
Colossus 2 is the newer of SpaceX’s two Memphis campuses. The original Colossus 1 already houses more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.
SpaceX wants the wider complex to reach two gigawatts of power. That would make Memphis one of the largest concentrations of AI compute anywhere.
Investors are still weighing the strategy. SpaceX shares fell sharply after its June IPO, even as the compute contracts piled up.
The bottom line
The Reflection deal is small next to the Anthropic one. At $150mn a month, it is roughly an eighth of what Anthropic pays.
But it matters for what it signals. SpaceX’s compute arm now underwrites the open-source side of the AI race. Yet its IPO growth story still leans on Grok.
For Nvidia, it is one more deal where it sells the picks and owns part of the mine.
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