Anthropic doubled Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise subscribers on Wednesday. The capacity behind the change comes from an unusual partner: SpaceX, which has agreed to hand over all of the compute at its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. That works out to more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs and over 300 megawatts coming online within the month, according to Anthropic's compute announcement.
The awkward part
SpaceX owns xAI. Elon Musk owns SpaceX. In February, Musk accused Anthropic of "hating Western civilization" on X. Anthropic, for its part, had previously cut xAI off from its API. Now Anthropic is renting the data center xAI built to train Grok.
The timing makes the deal stranger. On Wednesday, in a reply to the Anthropic post, Musk said xAI would be "dissolved as a separate company" and folded into a new unit called SpaceXAI. So the entity selling Anthropic this capacity is in the middle of being absorbed.
Musk also offered an unusual public reversal:
"By way of background for those who care, I spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity and was impressed."
That kind of warmth from Musk about a competitor is rare enough to read twice. Whether it's genuine or transactional, the deal is the deal.
Why it's less weird than it looks
Colossus 1 isn't xAI's frontier facility anymore. The company has been pouring capital into Colossus 2 and a larger Memphis-area buildout called Macrohard. Anthropic gets a turnkey site without waiting two years for new construction. SpaceXAI monetizes hardware that's been overtaken by its own roadmap. Neither side has to acknowledge they used to be enemies.
Colossus 1 also carries environmental baggage. The NAACP filed suit against xAI in April over the gas turbines powering the Memphis facility, alleging Clean Air Act violations. None of that changes when the compute is being used to train Claude instead of Grok.
What users actually get
For Claude Pro and Max subscribers, the immediate win is the doubled five-hour Claude Code limit. Peak-hours throttling, which Anthropic introduced in late March and which paid users complained about loudly, is also gone for Pro and Max accounts. The weekly limits stay where they were, a detail Anthropic mentions briefly and power users will hit faster than before.
The Claude Opus API also gets a considerable bump, with new ceilings listed in Anthropic's rate limits documentation.
What isn't said
Anthropic hasn't disclosed the price of the Colossus 1 deal, the contract length, or whether SpaceX retained any option on the capacity. It also hasn't said how much of the 300 megawatts goes to Claude Code versus the API versus training. The phrase "directly improve capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers" does a lot of work.
The company also said it has "expressed interest" in working with SpaceX on multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute. Nothing has been signed there.
The new Claude Code limits are live now. Colossus 1 capacity comes online within the month. The Code with Claude developer conference continues in San Francisco this week.
