Google has locked in a major agreement to lease huge amounts of AI computing power from SpaceX, giving the rocket company a nice revenue boost ahead of its upcoming IPO.
According to securities filings released by SpaceX last Friday, the deal runs from October 2026 through June 2029. Google will pay SpaceX $920 million per month for access to computing capacity equivalent to at least 110,000 NVIDIA chips.
SpaceX said it will gradually expand the available capacity starting this summer. If SpaceX fails to deliver as promised by October, Google can walk away. After that, either side can end the contract with 90 days' notice.
This is the second big computing rental deal SpaceX has landed in recent months. The company is set to go public on June 12 with a massive $1.77 trillion valuation.
Why SpaceX Is Renting Out Compute
SpaceX has been building its own massive "Colossus" supercomputer clusters to train xAI's Grok models. With some capacity sitting idle, the company decided to rent out the excess power.
In its investor presentations, SpaceX is heavily promoting its long-term vision of building data centers in space. The big appeal? Ground-based data centers are getting extremely expensive to run because of sky-high electricity costs. Tech giants are increasingly interested in this new orbital approach.
Strong Existing Ties Between Google and SpaceX
Google's parent company, Alphabet, has been an investor in SpaceX for years, and a Google executive (Donald Harrison) currently sits on SpaceX's board.
Google Cloud said in a statement that this is a short-term bridge deal to handle faster-than-expected demand for its Gemini Enterprise AI platform and intelligent agent services.
The two companies had already been in talks about jointly developing space-based data centers. Google is also working on its own "Project Daylight" initiative, aiming to launch orbital data center satellites by 2027 in partnership with Planet Labs.
Elon Musk commented on Thursday at a Morgan Stanley event that future SpaceX orbital data centers will be compatible with chips from multiple vendors, including Google's own custom AI technology.
Another Big Customer: Anthropic
This isn't SpaceX's first big AI customer. Last month, Anthropic announced it is renting 220,000 NVIDIA chips from SpaceX, with a monthly fee of $1.25 billion - also running through 2029. Anthropic said it would be interested in connecting to SpaceX's future space data centers once they're ready.
Overall, these deals show SpaceX is quickly turning its massive computing infrastructure into a serious new revenue stream while it prepares to go public.
