SpaceX: the Colossus lease that prices urgency

• 300MW+of capacity leased to Anthropic at Colossus 1, across more than 200,000 NVIDIA GPUs
• $1.25Ba month through May 2029, with either side able to walk on ninety days' notice
• ~$50Bannualized per gigawatt-year — four to six times the long-contract rate

This is the most legible price in the AI compute market, because it is a single contract with a disclosed rate, a disclosed term, and an unusual exit clause. More than 300 megawatts at $1.25 billion a month, running through May 2029, cancellable by either side on ninety days' notice.

Annualized, that is roughly $15 billion a year for a bit over 0.3 gigawatts: about $50 billion per gigawatt-year, against $8–12 billion for capacity on a long contract.

Why anyone pays it

Because the alternative is waiting. A buyer with demand this quarter cannot wait eighteen months for a building, and the ninety-day walk clause is the tell: a tenant paying four to six times the committed rate for a multi-year term would not need an exit that short unless the premium was priced as a bridge rather than a home.

The premium is therefore a schedule. It prices the gap between when demand arrives and when supply does, which means it closes as supply lands, and it is not a yield anyone should underwrite.

What is said, and what is disclosed

Public framing of the buildout runs to ten gigawatts and to $300–500 billion of annual revenue at that scale. Both figures are projections, not disclosures, and the second is the same revenue-per-gigawatt arithmetic that this site exists to check: at $10–15 billion of realized revenue per gigawatt-year, ten gigawatts supports $100–150 billion, not $300–500 billion.

The lease, unlike the projections, is a signed number. It says the market currently pays a large premium for capacity that exists, and it says nothing about what that capacity will earn once it is ordinary.