xAI turns surplus GPUs into a leasing business as it chases more capacity

Elon Musk’s xAI built some of the largest AI clusters on the planet. Now it is renting much of that hardware to other companies, including direct rivals. The landlord era at Colossus xAI’s fleet of nearly 550,000 NVIDIA GPUs was running at a utilization rate of approximately 11%, according to the research findings. Zoom in on Colossus 1, its first major data-center cluster, and the picture looks similar. About 60,000 GPUs were active there as of May 2026, which works out to roughly 11% utilization. xAI moved its training workloads to the newer Colossus 2 cluster, leaving the older facility with a lot of expensive silicon and not much to do. The biggest tenant is Anthropic, which signed a multi-year agreement for the full capacity of Colossus 1. That covers around 220,000 GPUs at $1.25 billion per month, running through May 2029. There is a catch for xAI. The Anthropic contract includes a 90-day termination clause, which means the headline figure is less locked in than the multi-year label implies. Google is next in line. It has secured approximately 110,000 GPUs at Colossus 2, with the deal set to start in October 2026. That agreement is valued at $920 million monthly and runs unti...