Open-source AI lab Reflection AI has signed a compute deal worth up to $6.3 billion with Elon Musk's SpaceX, locking in NVIDIA GB300 chips at the Colossus 2 data center in Memphis. The New York startup will pay $150 million a month starting July 1, with the contract running through 2029 if neither side exercises a 90-day exit clause. The agreement was announced on June 22.
Colossus 2 becomes a commercial platform
The deal caps a fast build-out that has turned Musk's Memphis campus into one of the world's largest third-party AI compute providers. SpaceX now has more than $80 billion in committed revenue from external customers through 2029, following prior tie-ups with Anthropic, Google and Cursor. Google alone is paying $920M a month for compute at Colossus 1 under a separate arrangement.
Nvidia sits on both sides of the trade
NVIDIA led Reflection's $2B October 2025 round at an $8B valuation with about $800M of its own capital, then supplied the GB300 hardware that anchors the new lease. Reflection's valuation has since climbed to roughly $25B on the promise of a Western open-source frontier model to counter Chinese labs such as DeepSeek. The company — founded in March 2024 by former DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou — still has no publicly released frontier model, but the compute deal gives it enough capacity to train one.
Compute is the frontier lab moat
The three-year lock-in signals just how tight the AI compute market has become. Frontier labs are increasingly leasing rather than owning their training clusters, and hyperscalers like SpaceX are turning what were internal data centers into revenue lines. It also cements NVIDIA's grip on the training stack, with the chipmaker embedded as both investor and supplier for the next wave of open-source frontier models.
Reporting based on coverage from CNBC, Axios and TechCrunch.