SpaceX Signs $150 Million Monthly Compute Deal With Open-Source AI Lab Reflection

SpaceX has signed a deal with Reflection, an open-source AI startup, to provide compute access at the company's Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee. The agreement, announced June 22, 2026, is the latest in a series of partnerships that have transformed Elon Musk's rocket company into a major AI infrastructure provider.

Reflection will pay SpaceX $150 million per month starting July 1, 2026, through 2029 for access to Nvidia's latest GB300 AI chips and supporting hardware at the Colossus 2 facility. The deal is expected to generate well over $6 billion in revenue for SpaceX over its term.

SpaceX's Data Center Pivot

Following its merger with Musk's AI startup xAI in February 2026, SpaceX began offering compute capacity to external developers rather than reserving it exclusively for training its own Grok model. The company has already signed similar deals with Anthropic and Google, two of the largest players in the AI race.

SpaceX also acquired Cursor, a popular AI coding platform, last week. The acquisition could help the company attract users to Grok and away from competitors such as Anthropic and OpenAI.

• Colossus houses more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, according to SpaceX.
• SpaceX went public earlier this month with the largest IPO in history.
• Nvidia has invested $800 million in Reflection, according to multiple reports.
• Reflection was cofounded in 2024 by a former Google DeepMind researcher who helped build AlphaGo.

Open-Source AI Gains Traction

Reflection markets itself as a democratic alternative to proprietary AI models. The company develops open-source models that are freely available for developers to access and build upon. Interest in open-source AI surged after the public debut of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab whose open-source models performed comparably to proprietary systems from OpenAI and Anthropic.

DeepSeek's success was largely enabled by distillation, a process that trains models using outputs from other AI systems. Open-source models that do not rely on distillation require significantly more compute, making partnerships with infrastructure providers like SpaceX essential for companies like Reflection.

The growing appeal of open-source models also has a political dimension. The Trump administration has sparred with Anthropic over alleged cybersecurity risks posed by its newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Open-source models, which can be audited by a community of developers, may be seen as a safer bet in a climate where the federal government has shown willingness to challenge proprietary AI companies.

SpaceX's stock price was down nearly 17% following the announcement, though the long-term revenue from the Reflection deal and other compute partnerships could provide a significant boost to the company's bottom line.