JAPAN PERSPECTIVE

Tokyo does not dwell on Anthropic's letter but on what is happening simultaneously: Japan Today highlights the SpaceX-Google deal announced Friday morning. Google will pay $920 million per month to SpaceX from October 2026 to June 2029 for roughly 110,000 Nvidia GPUs — a total of around $30 billion over the contract's life. The Japanese paper notes the troubling parallel: this deal resembles the one struck with Anthropic, which already rents compute from SpaceX's Colossus data centers in Memphis for $1.25 billion per month. The facilities were originally built for Musk's rival xAI project. For Tokyo, this reshapes the pause debate: Anthropic, which publicly asks to slow down, is SpaceX's number-one compute customer — and SpaceX is about to list at $1.8 trillion. The paper quotes Google Cloud's spokesperson: "This is a short-term, timely agreement to ensure we have bridge capacity to meet surging customer demand for our agent platform, Gemini Enterprise." And the brutal detail that sums it up: xAI posted a $6.4B operating loss on $3.2B revenue in 2025. The US AI ecosystem is losing fortunes at speed — and going public now means asking the broad public to pay for models their own creators admit they don't know how to control.