First came Anthropic, then Google. Now, Reflection, an open-source AI startup, is turning to SpaceX to access its abundant supply of AI chips. The deal is valued at up to $6.3 billion, with either party having the option to terminate the contract with 90 days' notice after the initial three months.

This agreement is smaller than SpaceX's previous deals with Anthropic and Google, which cost those companies $1.25 billion per month and $920 million per month, respectively. Those contracts also run through July 2029, though Elon Musk has publicly downplayed the three-year term, emphasizing that the contracts can be canceled at any time.

Reflection used this compute deal—its first—to highlight the value of its open-weight AI strategy, which it has positioned as an open-source alternative to closed frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. Open-weight AI models, which publicly release their trained parameters, have gained more attention following the U.S. government's ban of Anthropic's closed models, Fable and Mythos.

The startup, founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers, stated that this compute deal is one of the largest announced open AI infrastructure commitments to date. "Recent events highlight how important open source is to the AI ecosystem, with more nations and enterprises recognizing the risks and costs associated with exclusively depending on closed models," a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "Our deal with SpaceXAI signals Reflection's strategic importance within the frontier AI ecosystem, and more compute means more runway to build the world's best open models at scale."

The Colossus data center was originally built by xAI, a company founded by Elon Musk that is now part of SpaceX, for its own AI efforts. As its internal pursuits have faltered, SpaceX leveraged its valuable AI chip holdings and began renting them out to some of the world's top AI labs.