xAI and Anthropic announced a „big partnership deal" - Anthropic is renting all the computing power of the Colossus 1 data centre in Tennessee. At first glance, a stellar move. On the second look, a quiet admission that xAI is no longer what it presented itself to be.

Elon Musk's company was sold for 250 billion dollars to SpaceX and is soon being dissolved as a separate organisation - it's being rebranded as SpaceXAI. All the co-founders besides Musk have left. Internal reports showed that even xAI staff don't use Grok for work. And now - instead of training frontier models, the company is renting GPUs to a competitor.

„This move secures revenue for xAI," analysts admit, „but at the same time it shows that no serious AI model training is happening there anymore." It's hard to sell the team as „innovative" when the main job is renting hardware to Anthropic - which, by the way, is a direct competitor to Grok.

The timing isn't an accident. SpaceX is preparing for an IPO, and Musk needs a narrative. Positioning as a „cloud provider" - a company that offers infrastructure - is more practical and more credible in the short term. But for investors looking for „the next OpenAI," it's a disappointment. It's not the same story as selling graphics cards to someone else's team, versus building your own AI nucleus.

Meanwhile, Colossus 1 already has an environmental lawsuit over its operations. Tennessee doesn't want another gaping hole in its power grid. The question is whether investors will see what analysts already see: that selling computing power isn't the same as power.