The newer location is about 3 miles southwest of the Memphis Airport (MEM), one of the world’s largest cargo airports and the center of FedEx operations (500 take-off and landings per day most concentrated in a 6 h FedEx window with lots of engines running on ramps and that produces about 2000 tons of NOx per year).

I live about 18 miles downwind of the new Colossus sites, the airport, and lots of truck logistics sites, and a large refinery.

I definitely will be getting 2x exposure to ozone and particulates from both Colossi when they are running full bore. Plus an extra dose of ultrafine particulate with my morning fresh air.

Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to be in Nashville instead with HCA, Oracle, many insurance and financial institutions, and the joy of country music.

As an avid Opus user I am in an ethical Nimby bind. We do need almost any investments we can get in Shelby County TN. I’ll take Anthropic in preference to Grok NOx. And it will be my NOx.

xAI’s turbines produce meaningful local/regional pollution (especially NOx in a vulnerable area) but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.

Seems like selc's time would be better spent trying to close the loophole that allows for unpermitted turbine generators instead of going after one company for doing what they were allowed to do when they did it.

I dug into this topic in some detail on my blog and it's both enraging and depressing.

https://poiesic.com/posts/pattern-recognition

Yup, and now Anthropic is complicit in the environmental damage and health problems for local residents that these data centers are causing.

But hey, number must go up, right?

So much for Dario’s ethics. He happily partners with Elon. He seems like just another power hungry monopoly seeking liar.

What's the tremendous externality of gas generators? People heat their own homes with natural gas and it's no big deal. How can a datacenter that is miles away be worse than that?

Bad read on the situation. xAI has too much compute and not enough customers using it. They have around half a million GPUs, some of which are stolen from Tesla, running at 11% utilization. xAI predicted more people would be using Grok, but Grok is not a SOTA model & users primarily want to use SOTA models. They have excess capacity and it makes sense to rent out GPUs to other customers while they improve their models.

Elon lost his lawsuit with openAI and knows xAI isn't on the same trajectory. Might as well try to win the bet and flip off Sam by supporting the best competition. Also they are getting a head start on AI as a commodity. I'm sure there's plenty of money to be made for those that can leverage their capital to essentially rent capacity right now. If he's not making enough off of grok, might as well cover their expenses.

FWIW, SpaceX (parent company of xAI) has an option to acquire Cursor for $60B that expires 7 days after their imminent IPO.

It was kinda obvious when SpaceX "acquired" it. Elon rewarded xAI investors/prevented lawsuits by giving them SpaceX equity, and that was that.

xAI might acquire Cursor. They are in the process of training new coding models and probably a new Grok.

Until they finish training, it makes sense to rent the excess capacity.

That's very doubtful given recent news that Colossus is running at 11% capacity and has hundreds of thousands of idle GPUs. xAI acquired too many GPUs and currently doesn't have enough customers to use them. That's why they are making compute deals with Anthropic and Cursor.

xAI is bleeding money and this compute deal with Anthropic will pay for all of xAI's capex ($25 billion) in 2 years.

Right, also Anthropic has been having difficult time getting more GPUs

We could see the first company vertically integrated from etching to chip to data center

I would guess it's purely because Grok isn't nearly in-demand enough to produce meaningful revenue. And they want to juice the numbers for IPO

And I'm sure it's a bonus point for Musk that it goes to OpenAI's most relevant competitor

As weird as it seems I think this is Musk’s best shot at winning over Altman. He has personal vendetta.

Elon got rid of most of the core xAI researchers recently. It looked like firings and he said something like Grok needs to be rewritten because it was fundamentally built in a bad way. My guess - Grok was not one of the top two models and had no traction beyond users on Twitter - so investing in it did not make sense. Or maybe he needs time to build a new team and rebuild Grok, and while he’s doing that, he needs revenue to make up for all the GPUs they bought.

Either way, I doubt he has any ‘real’ advantage in this game. It’s OpenAI and Anthropic, and then everyone else including the open weight models.

What advantage? Has there ever been any indication they’re leading in any segment? Sure Elon has thrown a bunch of money at hardware, but to what end?

And frankly as bad as Altman is from a: if AI is really going to disrupt humanity do I want this guy in charge? Elon is 10x worse. So why would the best and the brightest ever work for him?

When did xAI have an advantage?

I think they overestimated the demand for Grok, which is mostly useless, and now they have too much compute on hand.

1) The situation you described would be covered under the contract between Anthropic and xAI, and that any violation of that would be subject to financial penalties and legal proceedings. The US has a robust corporate legal system, and disputes do get resolved through the court system, although in a slow and costly manner.

The contract can stipulate a penalty at a high enough amount to discourage this behavior.

2) Output from models & intra-datacenter communications can be encrypted if customers truly cared.

3) There is no reason do this, because there are far better ways to exfiltrate data from Anthropic models. Chinese companies are already doing this at an industrial scale where they are reselling Claude tokens for 10-20% of the cost while retaining the data to train their own models. https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

If we look at Deepseek V4-pro, created by Deepseek who Anthropic formally accused of harvesting Claude tokens at scale, it performs the same as Claude did 6 months prior.

What prevents a data center operator from reading your chats? [FEATURE] Provide a way to select your data center #56916 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/56916

xAI had a lot of negotiating power here because Anthropic had ~0 comparable options and ultimately desperately needed the compute now. So, it wouldn't surprise me if data sharing was an explicit part of the agreement

There's accusations that the Chinese labs have done essentially that to OpenAI and Anthropic and exfiltrated their models without having DC access, so if you had DC access, yes, you could do that. If you had DC access though you could just copy the model onto an SSD.

Opus and GPT are so different there’s room for both and I wouldn’t be ignoring Gemini even if it isn’t ahem great at coding, since it’s quite obviously very good otherwise.

In the times before you also would rather have very smart people working together instead of one very smart dude alone even if he had an identical twin.

General AI is that scenario. The investor dream is that their horse hits general AI first, patents it (or otherwise somehow stops the competition from hitting it), and then reaps the massive benefits.

I'm not saying it's a likely scenario, but I genuinely believe a big percentage of AI investment revolves around that (or similar) scenarios.

This might come down to when you expect plateau to happen. You could have said similar about transistor density many decades ago.

(I'm not denying it could happen next year for all we know. But we simply don't know, and from what I hear from researchers the breadth of ideas we've tried are still small)

Over the past 6 months, Anthropic has made more waves as a product company than a frontier lab.

Grok’s whole thing is being irresponsible and edgy. Can’t s ee Anthropic going for that, can’t see Grok’s customer base accepting an AI that refuses to do nonconsensual porn.

Anthropic is paying real cash, how is it fake revenue?

He talked with the Anthropic team, and his concerns lessened. It's actually a good thing to be able to change one's mind.

The eternal truth: money talks, bullshit walks

Musk will buy Anthropic and fix the wokeness. It was done before.