SpaceX revealed in a regulatory filing on Friday that Google will pay it $920 million a month for computing power, pumping billions of dollars into Elon Musk’s rocket company as it prepares for a blockbuster initial public offering.
The agreement, which starts in October and runs through June 2029, could earn SpaceX about $30 billion in total. It also helps establish SpaceX — which owns Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence lab, xAI — as a major infrastructure provider as companies compete in a fierce global race to dominate A.I.
As part of the agreement, Google will gain access to about 110,000 A.I. chips from Nvidia, which Google said would help it meet larger-than-expected customer demand for its A.I. models. The tech giant said in April that its cloud business had contracts totaling $460 billion that had yet to be fulfilled as revenue, indicating enormous demand for its services.
“Google Cloud and SpaceX are longtime partners,” a Google Cloud spokesman said in a statement. “This is a short-term, timely agreement to ensure we have bridge capacity to meet surging customer demand for our agent platform, Gemini Enterprise, which has been even higher than we expected.”
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
SpaceX reached a similar deal last month to provide Anthropic, another leading A.I. lab, with computing power. Anthropic, which is also expected to go public this year, is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month.
SpaceX is expected to go public next week in a deal that could value the company at more than $1.7 trillion and make Mr. Musk a trillionaire. As part of that process, the company has shed more light on its financial details in recent weeks to entice investors.
Mr. Musk has built a massive supercomputer in Memphis to power xAI. But the company has largely lagged behind competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
In the run-up to SpaceX’s going public, Mr. Musk has increasingly leaned into A.I. He has promoted xAI’s computing power as an asset, demonstrating that it can be turned into revenue through deals with Anthropic and Google.
Mr. Musk has also announced details of a giant chip factory he’s building in Texas. And in April, SpaceX announced a $60 billion deal to acquire the A.I. start-up Cursor, which makes a code-writing assistant.
The deal with Google deepens ties between the search giant and the rocket maker. Google owns a roughly 5 percent stake in SpaceX, and has explored the possibility of using SpaceX as a launch partner as Google seeks to put data centers in space, an effort known as Project Suncatcher.
Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].
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