Elon Musk says AI rivals are hounding SpaceX to rent its compute
SpaceX chief Elon Musk is facing relentless demand for computer power.
The short version
- AI rivals want to rent the company spare processing capacity.
- Musk says demand is so high they could rent it out several times over.
- Half the capacity stays inside for Grok and coding startups.
Why it matters to you. For business owners watching the artificial intelligence boom, the massive hardware crunch means technology costs and server prices will likely stay high as everyone fights for the same microchips.
SpaceX is fielding relentless requests from artificial intelligence rivals looking to rent out the company's computing power. Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of SpaceX, revealed during a Tuesday earnings call that the aerospace company is constantly hounded by major cloud providers and dozens of smaller companies trying to secure processing capacity.
Musk said they could easily rent out the company compute several times over if they said yes to everyone. The massive demand comes as SpaceX builds out its own artificial intelligence ambitions, including scaling the AI chatbot Grok and Cursor, a coding startup the company recently acquired.
Musk explained that SpaceX plans to keep roughly half of its computing power for internal use and rent out the other half to outside parties on a flexible basis. Rather than locking themselves into long-term contracts, they intend to rent at spot market rates because the value of computing power keeps climbing.
Musk likened the industry-wide scramble to a famous Monty Python sketch where a customer asks for cheese that is never in stock, noting that even SpaceX struggles to rent outside compute for its own training needs.
