SpaceX inks compute deal with Reflection AI, an open source AI lab

An open source AI startup has signed a deal with SpaceX to rent access to advanced AI chips from a data center for monthly payments running through 2029. The deal is worth up to 6.3 billion dollars and is smaller than SpaceX's existing contracts with other AI companies. This matters because it reflects growing attention to open-weight AI models, which publicly release their trained parameters, particularly following a government ban on certain closed AI models. The startup was founded by former researchers and frames the deal as evidence that open source AI strategies can compete for major computational resources in the frontier AI ecosystem.