In Brief Posted: 2:29 PM PDT · May 20, 2026 Image Credits:Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto / Getty Images Earlier this month, Anthropic surprised the AI world with a deal to buy 300 megawatts worth of compute — securing the entire output of the Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee.
In Brief Posted:
5:21 PM PDT · May 20, 2026
Image Credits:Ludovic MARIN / AFP / Getty Images
Anthropic has told its investors that it will more than double revenue to around $10.9 billion in its second quarter, and deliver an operating profit for the first time, the Wall Street Journal reports.
That’s a big milestone and fast quarter-over-quarter growth that would put it in an advantageous position relative to its chief competitor, OpenAI. However, the WSJ reports, it may not remain profitable throughout the year due to the large compute costs it’s scheduled to incur.
These financials were recently shared with the company’s investors as part of a funding round.
The startup has gained in popularity over the past year, as more and more professionals have expressed a preference for its chatbot, Claude. The company has also made recent efforts to diversify its customer base — including announcing a new service for small business owners and new tools for law firms.
Interestingly, this info about Anthropic’s alleged profitability dropped the same day as news broke about OpenAI likely filing for its IPO soon. Anthropic declined to provide further comment.
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Elon Musk’s xAI lost $6.4 billion from operations on just $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025, according to SpaceX’s IPO filings. And the losses are poised to grow. SpaceX’s filing reveals plans to scale Grok to “multiple trillions of parameters,” a dramatic boost that will likely require significant additional compute spend.
Elon Musk merged his AI company xAI — which had previously acquired his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) — with his rocket and satellite company SpaceX in February before announcing that he’d take the combined company public this year. While AI competitors OpenAI and Anthropic are also eyeing public debuts in 2026, SpaceX’s is expected to be one of the largest in history with a potential $1.75 trillion valuation.
The filing marks the first public glimpses into xAI, and therefore X’s, financials. In 2024, xAI recorded a loss of $1.56 billion on $2.62 billion in revenue. By 2025, losses had ballooned to $6.4 billion on $3.2 billion, meaning the gap between what xAI earns and spends is widening. Meanwhile, competitor (and customer) Anthropic reportedly expects a 130% revenue jump to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, leading to its first operating profit.
The jump in revenue from 2024 to 2025 came in large part from “AI solutions and infrastructure revenue” totalling $465 million, which includes $365 million in X and Grok subscription revenue, and $88 million in data licensing. An additional $116 million came from advertising.
AI segment capital expenditures climbed from $12.7 billion in 2025 to $7.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone. That’s an annualized capex run rate of about $30.8 billion, more than doubling year-over-year.
So far, that investment has resulted in growing, but still limited, user numbers. Per the filing, SpaceX recorded 117 million monthly active users for Grok AI features as of March 2026, out of 550 million total MAUs across Grok and X combined. That implies only one-fifth of the combined ecosystem is actively using Grok AI features.
Still, SpaceX intends to soldier on with Grok; its next-generation AI is expected to scale to “multiple trillions of parameters,” which the filing describes as a “step change in reasoning in depth and overall intelligence.” It’s an ambitious target, and one that’s now recorded in the audited annals of SEC history.
It’s also a target that will undoubtedly require more investment. The SpaceX filing’s “use of proceeds” section mentions an “expansion of our AI compute infrastructure.” Per the filing, xAI’s Colossus and Colossus II data centers — both of which came online in 122 days and 91 days, respectively — collectively provide about 1 gigawatt of compute power. These are both used for Grok’s training and inference. SpaceX claims that owning the compute infrastructure and vertically integrating across the AI stack lets them “train and iterate frontier models at lower cost and higher velocity.”
Another way that SpaceX might assuage investor fears about spending is by performing training and inference on orbital data centers, which Musk has promised to be a much cheaper alternative to terrestrial data centers. That sci-fi vision isn’t likely to happen for several years, though. The filing says SpaceX intends to begin deploying its orbital AI compute satellites as early as 2028 — the first concrete timeline set for such a launch.
“The future of AI will be determined by control of the physical stack,” the filing reads. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy, and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence. Her work has also appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and other publications.
You can contact or verify outreach from Rebecca by emailing rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at rebeccabellan.491 on Signal.
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Elon Musk’s xAI has gotten itself in hot water over its use of polluting generators at its data center near Memphis, Tennessee. Now, it wants to buy even more of them.
In SpaceX’s IPO filing, released Wednesday, the company said its xAI division will buy another $2.8 billion worth of turbines for its AI infrastructure over the next three years. One deal, worth $2 billion, is specifically for “mobile gas turbines,” the kind that it’s currently being sued over.
The NAACP filed a lawsuit against xAI last month for operating dozens of unregulated gas turbines that worsen air quality in one of the most polluted parts of the country. The organization has sought an injunction against xAI’s use of the turbines. So far, xAI has been granted permits for 15 turbines. As of a few weeks ago, it was using 46.
Each of the types of turbines xAI is operating have the potential to emit more than 2,000 tons of NOx pollution annually, a group of chemicals that contributes to asthma-inducing smog.
The company claims that it can operate the turbines for up to a year without permits because they are “mobile” — that is, they’re still on the trailer they were shipped on. The company appears to be exploiting a discrepancy between state and federal interpretations. Mississippi claims it doesn’t need to permit mobile generators.
But federal regulations say that turbines of that size, even if they’re on a trailer, are still subject to air-pollution regulations. The EPA ruled earlier this year that xAI was operating the turbines in violation of federal law.
SpaceX acknowledges the risks in its IPO filing. “We currently rely significantly on natural gas and gas turbine technology to power our data center operations,” it wrote. Injunctions or rescinded permits “would adversely affect our AI business.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor.
De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA degree in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.
You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing tim.dechant@techcrunch.com.
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In Brief Posted:
2:29 PM PDT · May 20, 2026
Image Credits:Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto / Getty Images
Earlier this month, Anthropic surprised the AI world with a deal to buy 300 megawatts worth of compute — securing the entire output of the Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee.
Turns out, compute at that scale isn’t cheap. Anthropic will be paying xAI $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with a discounted rate for the first two months as xAI completes its ramp-up. All told, the deal could bring xAI over $40 billion in revenue.
Details of the transaction emerged from SpaceX’s S-1 filing with the SEC. The deal, the company said, “allows us to monetize unused compute capacity in our infrastructure.” The terms of the deal allow either side to terminate the contract with 90 days’ notice.
“We expect to enter into additional similar services contracts,” the filing stated.
The move has given xAI a hybrid stance in the AI market. Most players either build data centers for themselves or build data centers for others to use — rarely both simultaneously. This emerging model, sometimes called a “neocloud,” lets AI companies offset infrastructure costs by acting as a cloud provider when their own usage falls short of capacity.
SpaceX argues the arrangement is a savvy use of resources. “We believe our dual monetization strategy provides multiple pathways to generate returns on invested capital,” it wrote. But the subtext is hard to miss. xAI appears to have overbuilt its compute capacity and needed to find a way to monetize it ahead of a public offering. Usage of Grok — xAI’s flagship AI assistant — has dropped significantly in recent months, freeing up servers that the company is now selling to one of its closest competitors.
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