Musk's Colossus idles at 11% and rents to the rivals it was built to beat

Colossus 1 rose from a defunct Electrolux site in Memphis and opened in July 2024, 122 days after construction began, carrying about 100,000 NVIDIA H100s ¹. Research circulated on 1 October↗ puts SpaceXAI's fleet of nearly 550,000 GPUs at about 11% utilization, with some 60,000 chips active at Colossus 1 as of May; the figure is single-source ². Training moved to Colossus 2 ². The old machine's biggest tenant is now Anthropic, the lab Grok was built to chase ²³.

A 122-day build meets an 11% reality

Anthropic contracted all of Colossus 1, about 220,000 GPUs, at $1.25 billion a month through May 2029; its leaked IPO prospectus↗ sizes the commitment at up to $84.5 billion ²³. Google takes 110,000 GPUs at Colossus 2 for $920 million a month through June 2029, a deal SpaceX disclosed in a June regulatory filing↗ ⁴.

Reflection AI pays $150 million and an unnamed client is due from December at $1.11 billion ⁵. Together the four sum to $3.4 billion a month, matching the $41.1 billion annualized lease revenue reported in September ⁵.

That stack props up a listed company: SpaceX folded xAI in February, rebranded the unit SpaceXAI in July, and floated on Nasdaq on 12 June in the largest offering on record; SPCX trades near $2 trillion of market value ⁴⁹¹⁰⁶. The research behind the lease figures says that income strengthens the narrative around the public offering ².

Multi-year headline, 90-day fine print

The fine print is the story. The bulk of Anthropic's commitment is cancelable on 90 days' notice, unlike its firmer deals with Google, Amazon and Microsoft ³. Google's lease can be ended by either party on 90 days' notice after this year, and SpaceX had to deliver the committed GPUs by 30 September or hand Google an exit after a month's grace ⁴. A lease either side can end inside a quarter is a quarterly rental with a multi-year headline. Tenants paid anyway, for whoever "could turn on 200,000 GPUs overnight", in ClusterMax analyst Jordan Nanos's estimate ⁷.

The build eats faster than it earns

Second-quarter capex ran $18.4 billion against $7.8 billion of revenue↗, after $10.1 billion in the first quarter, when the AI segment lost $2.5 billion on $818 million of sales ⁸⁴. Colossus has absorbed more than $35.8 billion ¹.

Elon Musk counts 110,000 GB200s and 440,000 GB300s at Colossus 2, with 220,000 more "fully operational next week", another batch in November and, "if we get lucky", a third by late December ⁷. Some sites ran months without backup power or cooling↗, and outages interrupted training ⁶.

The tenants can leave, and that is the point

Google calls the lease "bridge capacity" for Gemini Enterprise demand ⁴. Anthropic's prospectus parks it in the cancelable fifth of $518 billion in commitments, the flexible slice of a rigid ledger ³.

The loser is whoever marks the $41.1 billion run-rate as locked multi-year revenue ⁵. The neoclouds, CoreWeave and Nebius, hold the pricing case: tenants paid roughly triple going rates to jump the queue ⁷, and three more batches of 220,000 chips arrive by December to chase the same buyers ¹.

December tells the truth

Google's cash starts this month, the unnamed tenant's in December, and Anthropic may file publicly as soon as mid-November ⁴⁵⁷. SpaceX is swapping data-center executives for rocket and Starlink operators, delaying new sites and adding a turbine-blade foundry ⁶. Watch the chip batches and the 2-gigawatt year-end target ²⁶, and one habit above all: whether anyone marking this stack as annuity income reads the exit clause first.