Google to pay SpaceX $920 million a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers

Days before a planned IPO that’s expected to raise record sums of cash, SpaceX has inked a deal with Google that will bring in $920 million a month by providing AI compute capacity to the search giant.

According to a regulatory filing on Friday, Google will use about 110,000 Nvidia graphics processing units, as well as central processors, memory and other components housed in SpaceX’s data centers. The agreement spans from October of this year through June 2029 at the $920 million rate, and with “capacity ramping up through September at a reduced fee.”

SpaceX said in the filing that if it fails to “deliver access to the committed amount of GPUs by September 30, 2026,” Google can immediately end the agreement, or accept the number of GPUs provided at a reduced fee after a one-month grace period.

After this year, the agreement can be terminated by either party provided they give 90 days’ notice.

A Google Cloud spokesperson told CNBC by email that the deal was made “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.” Google introduced Gemini Enterprise — subscriptions for large businesses — in October.

The Google agreement marks the second massive infrastructure deal announced by SpaceX following its merger in February with xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, in a transaction that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. Last month, Anthropic announced a deal to use all of SpaceX’s compute capacity at its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee.

Alphabet has made a windfall from backing SpaceX. Musk’s company was worth $12 billion at the time of Google’s 2015 investment, and is aiming to go public next week at a valuation of over $1.75 trillion.

Musk is trying to boost SpaceX’s AI story ahead of next week’s offering to show that the company is getting at least some return on its hefty investment in multiple data centers in and around Memphis. SpaceX said in its prospectus that capital expenditures in the first quarter totaled $10.1 billion, more than doubling from a year earlier, with the vast majority of those costs — $7.7 billion — committed to AI.

Meanwhile, the AI segment of the business recorded an operating loss in the quarter of $2.5 billion on just $818 million in revenue. Musk has touted xAI’s Grok model and chatbot as a rival to offerings from AI leaders OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, but his company’s products have yet to make much of a dent in the booming market.

SpaceXAI faces multiple lawsuits and government probes in the U.S. and abroad after Grok enabled users to easily create and share non-consensual sexual images, or deepfake porn, by modifying photos or videos of adults and children.

In March, following an exodus of talent from xAI, Musk said Grok needed to be rebuilt. The company then struck a deal that gives it the option to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion.

In the meantime, SpaceX is working to make money from the data centers originally built to handle Grok-related workflows.

“We believe our compute infrastructure and related strategy provides us with substantial flexibility in how we allocate and monetize capacity,” SpaceX said in a section of its IPO filing on “compute service agreements with third parties.”

In the prospectus, SpaceX named Google as a competitor in connectivity, where SpaceX operates its Starlink satellite internet service, and Google operates its fiber broadband business. And in AI, SpaceX said it competes with Google as well as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Microsoft.

Google is significantly ramping up spending on AI as it races to keep up with rival hyperscalers. The company in April revised its capital expenditure forecast this year to between $180 billion and $190 billion, up from its previous estimate of $175 billion to $185 billion.

Alphabet said this week it plans to sell $85 billion in stock, including through a $10 billion investment by Berkshire Hathaway, to meet “unprecedented customer demand.”

In jumping into the infrastructure leasing market, SpaceX is also competing with a group of companies, commonly called neoclouds, that includes CoreWeave and Nebius. Those stocks got hammered on Friday as part of a broader tech selloff, but bounced back some following the SpaceX-Google announcement.

Google and SpaceX forged a cloud pact in the past, but with their roles reversed. Five years ago, Google agreed to supply computing and networking resources to SpaceX to help deliver internet service through its Starlink satellites. The agreement called for SpaceX to install ground stations at Google data centers, and marked a big win for Google in its effort to keep pace with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

“They chose us because of the quality of our network and the distribution and reach of our network,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud group, said at the time.

—CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.

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