In the short term, there’s an obvious logic at work. xAI’s existing products are mostly focused on Grok, which has seen plummeting usage since the image generation debacles earlier this year. If xAI’s data center buildout is much more than what Grok needs to operate, partnering with Anthropic adds a lot of green to the balance sheet. This is especially useful as the company, now combined with SpaceX, speeds toward an IPO. More broadly, having Anthropic lined up as a customer makes it easier to believe that SpaceX’s orbital data center play might actually work.

But beyond the short-term benefit, the Anthropic partnership sends an unusual message about where Elon Musk’s priorities really lie. It suggests the company’s real business may be more about building data centers than training AI models.

It’s rare to see a major tech company treat compute resources this way when companies like Google and Meta, which are also training models, are building more data centers. It’s an easy point to miss, because so many of these companies are working as enterprise AI vendors, online services, and cloud providers all at once. But when forced to make a choice between selling more available compute to customers and preserving some to build their own tools, they reliably choose door No. 2.

Just last month, Sundar Pichai admitted on a call that Google Cloud revenue was lower than it could have been because the company was “capacity constrained” — and when given the choice of renting out their GPUs or using them to develop AI products, Google chose the AI products.