Theo Wayt

The U.S. Pentagon disclosed in a court filing that it used xAI's Grok AI model to support bombing mission planning against Iran earlier in 2026. The Grok model operates as part of Maven Smart Systems, a government AI service designed for national security applications. The disclosure emerged as the Department of Justice fights a data center lawsuit, raising questions about AI deployment in military operations.

SpaceX filed to go public at $135 per share, planning to raise $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation. The IPO would be the largest in history by a significant margin, more than double the previous record. The company plans to sell 555.6 million shares in the offering.

Elon Musk confirmed Thursday that SpaceX has committed to a six-month lease of its data center capacity to Anthropic, with the option to extend beyond that initial period. The arrangement provides more specificity than SpaceX's recent S-1 filing disclosed. The deal represents a significant infrastructure partnership between the two companies as AI compute demand accelerates.

Cursor staff have begun visiting xAI offices to meet with employees and discuss their work, weeks after Elon Musk's company secured an option to acquire the coding startup for $60 billion. The visits have coincided with fresh employee exits at xAI, including staff reductions that occurred last Friday, according to sources with direct knowledge of both companies. The activity signals early integration planning between the two firms and suggests potential organizational shifts at xAI as the acquisition option moves forward.

Anthropic has secured a deal to purchase all compute capacity from xAI's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, effective within the coming month. The facility operates at 300 megawatts and contains over 220,000 Nvidia chips. This agreement represents a significant infrastructure commitment for Anthropic as it scales model training and deployment, while providing xAI with a major customer anchor for its first large-scale data center.

Starcloud, a two-year-old startup building orbital data centers, is in talks to raise at least $200 million at a post-money valuation around $2.2 billion, just one month after closing a $170 million Series B at $1.1 billion. The rapid funding push reflects investor appetite for the concept of placing data centers in low earth orbit to leverage abundant solar energy. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has positioned orbital data centers as a key element of the rocket company's upcoming IPO, though skepticism persists across the broader data center industry about the technology's viability.

Amazon is committing up to $25 billion to Anthropic, with $5 billion deployed immediately and up to $20 billion tied to commercial milestones. This investment builds on an earlier $8 billion commitment, bringing Amazon's total potential exposure to $33 billion. The companies did not disclose specific commercial targets or timelines for the additional funding tranches.