Reuters, citing The Wall Street Journal on Friday (17th), reported that sources familiar with the matter revealed SpaceX (SPCX-US), the company led by Elon Musk, is in talks with the U.S. Department of Defense to collaborate on providing billions of dollars worth of data center computing power to run artificial intelligence (AI) models.

If the deal is successfully concluded, it would further strengthen the partnership between the Department of Defense and SpaceX. SpaceX is already a key partner of the Pentagon, responsible for rocket launches, satellite communications, and missile tracking, among other missions.

According to the report, SpaceX has recently discussed plans to more directly compete with emerging cloud computing providers such as CoreWeave (CRWV-US), aiming to attract more enterprise customers by offering competitively priced AI computing resources.

Like many large organizations, the U.S. Department of Defense has been actively expanding its cloud computing capabilities in recent years to support intelligence and military AI applications.

Amazon (AMZN-US) announced last year that it would invest up to $50 billion through its cloud service division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), to expand AI and supercomputing infrastructure for U.S. government clients.

The Wall Street Journal noted that negotiations between SpaceX and the U.S. Department of Defense are still ongoing and could ultimately fall through.

In recent months, SpaceX has signed several major AI computing capacity deals. In June, SpaceX signed a multi-year cloud services agreement with Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet (GOOGL-US), to provide approximately 110,000 Nvidia (NVDA-US) AI chips and related computing infrastructure.

AI startup Anthropic announced in May that it has partnered with SpaceX to fully utilize SpaceX's Colossus 1 computing facility in Memphis, Tennessee, adding 300MW of computing capacity.

SpaceX shares closed down 5.4%, at $123.99 per share on Friday.

FACT BOX

  • Source: PR Times
  • Category: Partnership
  • Organizations: SpaceX / CoreWeave / Amazon
  • Products / services: Colossus 1 / Starlink