Colossus 1 datacenter is the one using illegal power, is poisoning the air for poor communities near Memphis, and is potentially poisoning the water. It's likely the additional demand on the grid will cause massive blackouts during extreme weather events, putting residents at further risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)#Envir...
So you can put Anthropic on your list of companies that like to talk big about safety, but when the rubber hits the road, profits matter more than safety.
Illegal is a strong term here. While the wiki link you included indicates there might be some permitting nuances, I've seen nothing claiming the power is "illegal."
xAI removed its illegal gas turbines and obtained permits for the others only after being sued by the Southern Environmental Law Center. They then built another unpermitted site (Colossus 2) across the state line in Mississippi, and they are being sued again. [0]
"The company began operations at its first site, Colossus 1, in June of 2024 and used as many as 35 unpermitted gas turbines to power the facility. Despite receiving intense public pushback over the use of illegal turbines and the lack of public input and transparency around Colossus 1, xAI officials said it planned on “copying and pasting” its unlawful turbine strategy to power Colossus 2."
"xAI removed its unpermitted turbines at the Colossus 1 data center after SELC, on behalf of the NAACP, sent a notice of intent to sue under the Clean Air Act. The company obtained permits for its remaining 15 turbines."
from perplexity deep research:
"Colossus‑related gas‑turbine power plants have been run in ways alleged to violate the Clean Air Act, in already over‑polluted Black and low‑income communities near Memphis, and Anthropic has now become the main user of that infrastructure."
I live in Memphis, none of this is true. What is true is that there is a concerted effort to smear anything related to xAI‘s presence in Memphis for some reason.
For some facts, the colossus data center is next-door to a steel mill and city sewage treatment plant, a vacated gigawatt scale coal power plant complete with nasty Coal Ash Ponds, and a brand new combined cycle gas power plant. The area is at the far edge of Memphis city limits up against the river, in a heavy industrial area. There’s even a major Valero oil refinery right there too.
Memphis has trillions and trillions of gallons of water, both in a gigantic underground aquifers and the Mississippi River itself. xAI has agreed to shed load in case of impending brownouts. The fear mongering is out of control.
They had a ton of portable turbines that were under operating under a temporary permit, and that was the disputed part. However, the blame should rest with TVA and or Memphis light gas and water for not being able to run an appropriate high voltage connection less than 1 mile from the plant to the data center in a timely manner. However… What difference does it make if the natural gas is burned at TVA plant or very similar gas turbines on site in the same neighborhood. Environmental groups and the county health department tried suing, was struck down, xAI works closely with the State, but the whining continues. xAI is paying gargantuan taxes to the city, no tax breaks.
These environmental groups do not care about the nasty unregulated cars burning oil, that I have to breathe every day. We terminated our motor vehicle inspection requirements due to the “burden” it places on the low income population. So they can burn their oil in my face, but then they sue to stop a SOTA turbine in an industrial area? There are junkyards in these same areas that burn their piles of waste tires every year or so “on accident”. No lawsuits there either.
Agreed there is a huge effort to smear as much as possible. Between parent comment being very highly voted and Wikipedia page being militantly updated and seeing these tired, wrong talking points everywhere, it's pretty obvious
> These environmental groups do not care about the nasty unregulated cars burning oil, that I have to breathe every day
That's a weird thing to say and makes me doubt everything else in your comment.
Just in case you were talking about some specific group I looked up who was doing the suing and they have lots of stuff about promoting trains and EVs etc.
They are literally suing the Trump administration (that Elon helped elect) on this topic.
> There are junkyards in these same areas that burn their piles of waste tires every year or so “on accident”. No lawsuits there either.
I wonder what drew xAI to this poorly regulated hellscape?
Also, one of the organisations suing xAI is also suing a) cement factories that burn tires for energy and b) tire companies that use the additive that kill salmon
We have similar issues here in Wisconsin. Especially when it comes to solar and battery storage facilities. I absolutely think there needs to be more regulations carved out for data centers, just as there is for any other industrial building, but yeah the great mongering is incredible to see. Especially when the argument of "save our beautiful farmlands" is brought up. Do you even know how nasty agricultural runoff is?
Not every allegation that appears in print is true. One should be very skeptical about these kinds of allegations, especially when there are deep-pocketed corporations involved who can be sued or pressured to settle in the face of sufficiently "plausible and persistent" (to borrow Hazlitt's term) claims of harm done by their operations.
So I was just Googling this, and apparently most datacenters don't pay any state tax on revenue generated by said datacenter? Huge loophole if true, no wonder capital investment in datacenters is so high. [0]
it's in a former appliance factory that's right next to two pre-existing TVA power plants, a Nucor steel mill, and a sewage treatment facility. you've been lied to about how close it is to a residential area, just look at a map
"The independent study, conducted by EmPower Analytics Group and commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center, was led by a Harvard-trained environmental health scientist Dr. Michael Cork and shows that operation of xAI’s proposed permanent gas turbines would measurably increase health risks for families throughout the area—even in places as far away as Germantown and North Memphis." - https://www.memphiscap.org/
> Data centers can inadvertently pollute water through chemical runoff from evaporative cooling systems, including biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals that accumulate at scale when facilities discharge up to 5 million gallons daily.
The plan was to develop a recycled wastewater facility, which will pull arsenic from contaminated shallow acquifers, and pump that into the drinking water supply's acquifers.
Since Cursor often relies on Claude models, some of those services will flow back to their own datacenter compute. Especially if there's, lets call it, "customer demand loadbalancing optimization agreements" that makes those Cursor services prioritize Claude models using the app keys that get load-balanced onto the SpaceX datacenter.
Did SpaceX just spend $10B to rent out its own datacenter, juicing their recurring revenue metrics with their own AI services investment?
Sure, if "pretty smart" means overinvest in capital spending on an dirty datacenter powered by unpermitted gas generators that you don't even need anymore because of lack of demand for your product, so you lease it to a competitor (presumably at a huge loss). I am not sure that "major source of revenue" as a datacenter provider is the kind of growth opportunity that IPO investors are looking for.
Its not even that. Its better to be involved in the game with a leader/help out a competitor who is competing against someone you don't like and don't want them to win, than to sit it out.
It was pretty obvious to me that the merger was a way of quietly shutting xAI down in a way that keeps investors happy. With it also being used as a vehicle to offload the Twitter debt to the public, he certainly has good accountants.
Yep - and in the meantime it's an asset of SpaceX to boost their IPO price, as long as this is done before people realize that xAI is apparently becoming a datacenter company not an AI one.
Then you've got SpaceX buying 1200 cybertrucks from Tesla, so it's serving as failure laundering vehicle for all his endeavors.
Why would they spend 10B and potentially 60B in cursor if they were to shut xAI down? And I'm pretty sure Elon wants to have a model of his own, even if weaker, so it's "not woke".
Yeah it's corporate subprime. Bundle a load of overpriced "assets" with made up valuations into something that's actually valuable, then shove it on the public markets so everyone has to buy it in their index trackers.
Plot twist but makes perfect sense for both companies.
Anthropic gets the compute they so desperately need to keep growing. Elon rents out compute that xAI couldn't make use of due to little demand for Grok. SpaceX gets revenue on the books for IPO.
PS. I want to translate this part:
We’re very intentional about where we’ll add capacity—partnering with democratic countries whose legal and regulatory frameworks support investments of this scale
To real speak:
We're putting profits above anything else. Yes, Elon is a far right guy who supported Trump, a president who isn't very democratic, but we're just really desperate for more money. We're also trying to make you forget that xAI is funded by Middle East non-democratic governments. Heck, we'll even buy compute from China if we can sell Anthropic models there.
>we'll even buy compute from China if we can sell Anthropic models there.
Considering that Anthropic mass-bans Chinese users accounts based on using VPN (used to circumvent the Chinese firewall) and then demands an ID or a residence permit of a country where Claude officially works to ensure that the user doesn't live in China, seems unlikely.
> funded by Middle East non-democratic governments
What's the problem here exactly? Are you insinuating any non-democratic government is bad and evil and only democratic governments are the correct and right way to govern? sort of like: "there is only one true prophet, and it's the one I follow, and all the others are false!"
Anthropic needs any compute they can get. So if Elon wants to build orbital data centers Anthropic would be happy to run models on it. There isn't really any doubt Elon can build orbital data centers the question is if they are economical compared to earth based.
I don't think space compute is going to work out, but I would certainly say "yes happy to buy space compute from you in the future if you offer it at a good price"
It makes no sense. We're being presented with a forced choice -- put them in space, or put them in the middle of downtown Seattle.
This is stupid. I don't understand what's happening... specifically, what mental virus is spreading that lowers everybody's IQ by 10-20 points, evidently including my own. Put the data centers in the ocean, powered by solar and networked with Starlink or LEO. Put them in the desert. Put them 20 miles south of Nowhere, Idaho.
Ehh, I think they are just "kissing the ring". This was part of the agreement for the terrestrial datacenter access, pretend like the space orbital compute is more than the boondoggle that it clearly is.
I want to be clear, I do think that one day something like that will exist, I just don't think it's anywhere close to being a reality, much like FSD.
Also it costs them, almost [0], nothing to say it and then later come up with some reason why they are no longer interested.
Most big tech CEOs are people that only "succeeded" due to have an unregulated monopoly or picking the right lotto ticket and not due to any innate above average intelligence. Go look at the 100s of billions in wasted capital and tell me who benefitted from such waste while workers + children suffer from lack of medical care.
You honestly expect this trajectory to continue unabated?
The whole armchair engineer debate online about this is hilarious
I'm just a software engineer, all I need to know is SpaceX is aggressively pursuing this - that's enough for me to believe it's viable
SpaceX operates literally orders of magnitudes more satellites than anyone else. If anybody understands the physics and engineering of space compute, it's SpaceX. Lay people debating this online is just showing their ignorance as far as I'm concerned, and it mostly comes from an emotional place of wanting Musk enterprises to fail
Thank you for a reasonable comment. I know internet people love to comment on how "dumb" things are, but we're seeing a growing group of funded, motivated, and intelligent people working towards a common goal. It's at least something to be curious about, I wish the comments were more oriented towards in-depth discussions on the actual current blockers.
They're in every discussion even remotely related to anything Elon Musk.
Everything Elon does is somehow stupid or evil. Actually, that reminds me of Thunderf00t YouTube streams where he was (or still is?) betting Starship would fail miserably every test flight, and he'd talk about how evil and stupid Elon is for 3 hours with chatters, watch the flight then say something like "it's still bullshit."
I think it's a mixture of cope and a little bit psyop from adversaries like Russia who are being crippled in Ukraine because of Starlink.
Doubling the five-hour rate limits is merely a marketing stunt if the weekly rates are not also doubled. It simply means that you can reach the weekly limits in three days instead of five.
Same. I hit limits after 45 minutes. I'm on a measly Pro plan. I'm usually building small, open source projects, often from scratch. I only work on these projects in a 2-hour window in the morning. This is my "free time" development. I hope this change helps, because I was days away from switching back to Codex, though I like Claude Code a bit better these days.
I also hope that the fact I had OpenClaw in my sandbox once is not why I hit these limits so damn fast. I don't use it anymore and I've tried to rid my sandbox of anything "openclaw" but it is in my git history in various places on various projects. Claude doesn't seem to be transparent about this limitation.
That’s because the week ends before you can use them because you’re waiting for your hourly resets. Now the week essentially got longer with the same limit
For me personally, I have the basic Claude Code subscription that I use to rewind on some evenings or on weekend, to code a bit for 1-2 hours. I have like 3-5 session with it every week.
The 5h windows are frustrating because I can go through them quickly if I have a more complex task. I haven't yet met the weekly limit. I'd say there are many cases similar to mine.
I disagree. I routinely hit the 5 hour limit on Pro with Opus 4.7 just trying to have it do one design task or comprehensive code review on a large PR, and the worst part is, the overhead and bringing all that context back into another 5 hour window blows through 30%+ of my 5 hour usage limit.
I've found with opus 4.6 which im still stubbornly using i can burn about 10% of the weekly within a 5 hour window with my workflow.
Mentally i think about the weekly usage in terms of usage per day so about 14% per day which results in me not using that much early in the week so i can kinda "burn freely" later on. which leads me to a spot where usually on the final two days im sorta thinking about how can i expend that usage ive "saved".
the 5 hour windows make this harder, sometimes the final day of the week im trying to get that 10% in every 5 hour window of my waking hours and i HATE that, i wanna work when i am most productive, not around some ridiculous window of time, i dont wanna think "I am gonna be utilizing claude the most around 11am so i should send a dumb message to haiku to get my 5 hour window started at 7:30am so i can have it roll over at 12:30."
So im happy about this change sure. But it is 100% them creating a problem and pretending having some relief from that problem is them doing their users a favor. I understand they are doing it to lower peak hours usage and all that, I still despise it.
People are waisting tokens by using Opus for everything.
Using Advisor [1], you can use Sonnet most of time; Sonnet can handoff work it can't handle to Opus. When Opus is done, you automatically go back to Sonnet.
> Looks like Elon's finally giving up on XAI and just selling the compute
I don't think that's certain yet, but I do think that the open-source models like Gemma and Qwen are getting so good so fast that even Anthropic has real risk around the long-term value of their models and tooling.
Basically, if I'm Anthropic or xAI, I try to get revenue whenever and wherever possible and see what sticks. There's no value in playing for monopolistic control when everything is so volatile.
I don't know if it relates to the same data centers, but this also comes hours after several still recent Grok models were deprecated at short notice. Grok 4.1 Fast is the cheapest way to do research on X (cheaper than the X API!) and it's gone on May 15: https://docs.x.ai/developers/models - freeing up compute to sell?
The details are secret. It very well could be wasted GPU time but Anthropic could have made a killer offering as well.
I'm just speculating, but a particularly killer offering Elon wouldnt be able to refuse would be if Anthropic agreed to give them some training data / technology.
Giving Musk the benefit of the doubt, here's a thought experiment: It doesn't seem like any of the big labs in the US can keep a lead for more than 3 months. The Chinese models are closing in. Even if xAI comes up with the best model, so what?
On the other hand, power and compute are limited. Ridiculous as orbital compute sounds, land/power on earth is not easily scalable. There are too many limiting factors, chief among which in the US is regulation. But in space, if you make one satellite work, you just get more resources and launch more. This also leads naturally to Tesla's plan for a chip fab.
I don't think this is giving up. He's getting inside information on how Claude works, and a huge stream of Claude usage data. This will all inform future grok development, IMO.
> 300 megawatts of new capacity (over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs)
The scale is just mindboggling here. Are there any blog posts or anything discussing what kind of infrastructure is used for even just the inference side (nevermind the training) for SotA models like Opus? I would have thought it might be secret, but given that you can actually run the models yourself on AWS Bedrock doesn't that give an indication?
I know you're probably talking about the compute infrastructure, but I think the electricity infrastructure side is interesting too, data centers are doing things in dumb ways because the need for operational expansion speed is greater than the need dollars:
> It’s regulation with the utilities. There are ramp rates, there are all of these things that you’re supposed to do to not screw up the grid. Data centers have been in gross violation of that. When you think about what’s wrong with data centers, they have load volatility, which we just talked about, then they decide to power it with behind-the-meter natural gas generators. These natural gas generators, their shaft is supposed to last for seven years. It’s lasting 10 months because of all the cycling.
I haven't bothered to look but I'd guess Mellanox GPU-to-GPU networks, and massive custom code for splitting tensors across GPUs, and for shuttling activations across GPU nodes.
> but given that you can actually run the models yourself on AWS Bedrock
That's not exactly how it works. Anthropic are hosting their models in AWS Bedrock as a managed service. Customers call those LLMs just like calling any other API. There's no visibility into what kind of AWS infrastructure is serving that API request.
All evidence is that the final training runs across thousands to low tens of thousands of GPU, and that a single instance of the resulting model runs (or could run) well within a rack (ie NVL72).
The massive scale is all massively parallel: test-time compute for users, test time compute for RL rollouts (and probably increasingly environments for those rollouts), other synthetic data generation, research experiments, …
Limits were the last straw that made me cancel my subscription and make my workflow completely model agnostic with pi.
While this is good news, I'm not coming back. Anthropic just lost me with too many wrongs in too short of a time period.
Opus has been replaced with GPT 5.5, DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen and they all allow me to use my own, single harness and switch models easily if any of them start treating me the same.
I wouldn't make any grand stand declarations like this honestly. The models themselves are all hot swappable with minimum effort. The AI labs american or chinese don't really have a moat. Today anthropic is bad and openai is good. Last month it was the other way around. Next month it may be google.
The only certainty is that you can swap models quickly and painlessly.
Same, though I'm reconsidering, in light of the recent bugs (which can happen to any provider) and the increased limits. I guess that's at least 3x more Opus for my usecase.
Say what you like about Sam Altman, but given how Anthropic is scrambling to sign capacity deals for compute we can sure say he was right about the capcity build out needed.
Scrambling? Seems to me xAI built too much capacity (for what they can use in 2026). Does that mean OpenAI built the right amount? I don't see how this proves that just because we see one AI company willing to sell compute. We don't even know the terms/pricing.
> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said his company tried to plan for 10-fold growth. But revenue and usage increased 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis, which he says explains why it’s been so hard to keep up with demand.
> “That is the reason we have had difficulties with compute,” Amodei said Wednesday at his company’s developer conference in San Francisco. Amodei added that the company is “working as quickly as possible to provide more” capacity and will “pass that compute on to you as soon as we can.
I think "scrambling" is a fair characterization of the CEO saying "we have had difficulties with compute" and "working as quickly as possible to provide more"
They've also signed new compute deals with Google and AWS recently.
Or the bubble he was pumping hasn't popped yet. We won't be able to say how much of this capacity was actually "needed" until 10 years in the future, if ever.
> First, we’re doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans.
The fine-print-omission appears to be that weekly limits are not doubled. The progressive 5-hour rate limit shrinking was indeed an efficiency blocker that finally convinced me to cancel, but being only able to get 4 full sessions a week as opposed to 8 doesn't compell me to resubscribe.
For my hobbyist purposes Deepseek v4 Flash has replaced Claude Code because I was also sick of hitting 5 hour limits with Claude. Right now, the only thing I miss from Claude is multi-modal image support. I can work around no image support since I can use v4 Flash all day and spend around $1. I am aware Deepseek is currently discounting their API at 75% off so I may try out another provider once the discount is gone at the end of the month.
At this point if feels like if you properly scope your work open weight LLMs are adequate.
If you can make up an inconsequential arbitrary rationalization to not use a service then I’m sure you can do the opposite to convince yourself to use it.
That’s what virtue signaling is I guess - the action you’re taking is pointless, the only point is to tell everyone you’re taking it therefore feed the narrative forward?
The entire economy runs off gas turbines though this is the thing you boycott?
You realize natural gas is one of the more environmentally friendly methods of generating power. Lots of work went into moving to natural gas generation to improve the environmental impact for electricity generation.
I think so, but that's also really great because I frequently run into the five hour caps, but very rarely use my entire weekly allotment. There are lots of situations where I do things like write the plan for all the work that has to get done, and then set a reminder to execute the plan after I get home, when I'm done making dinner (because e.g. my five hour cap ends at 6pm). Higher caps for the five hour period is a lot more convenient.
The purpose is to control the total amount of requests they need to handle in a given timeframe. If everyone could use up their whole weekly limit in 5 hours, many would do so, thus pushing the GPU/TPU clusters to or above their capacity limits.
That is one take, but here is how I interpret it. They spent a lot of money training a model which isn't doing enough inference to justify continuing to use those GPUs, and now they are buying even more GPUs to build an even bigger model that also won't be very popular.
Oh. Just as I'm in the process of migrating to Pi+Qwen (local). This was probably going to be my last month on the Pro sub as I'm seriously fed up with the limits and degradation that started weeks after I signed up. Let's see how this shakes out.
How does Pi+Qwen (local) compare to Anthropic's offerings? Surely you're not getting the same breadth and quality of output using Qwen? How is the performance?
So far I've only really set things up and done some benchmarking (a set of capability prompts created and evaluated by Claude, HumanEval and MBPP; haven't completed the latter 2) on several local models (Qwen 1.7b, 4b, 9b & 35b a3b; 1.7b got 6/8 correct at ~14.7 tok/s on the capability set, to 35b for 8/8 at ~4.5 tok/s; can share full results if interested), and setup llama-swap so I can dynamically select them. I'll need to decide which of my projects I'll be really testing them on, with the awareness that I'll have to be even more involved.
this feels more like something designed to bolster the spacex ipo than anything else
300MW is peanuts compared to their multiple 50GW+ deals to the point you start to wonder why just 300MW is making the difference in their capacity that they can increase limits this much... also, why couldn't their many existing multi billion dollar deals not allow them to expand capacity?
when you take this into account, then you read their statement about orbital compute it starts to smell quite fishy
What's the current status of the 'biggest computer wins' vs. specialized proprietary research/data in the AI arms race? People had such high hopes for xAI because of the monster machine Elon built. Or has xAI just turned over too much staff too quickly?
I want to believe. A couple of weeks ago I fell into this "trap", they offered a similar thing. I subscribed to the Pro Plan. Had fun for a couple of weeks and then I entered frustration phase. I love the product, but I hate those up and downs. My rant made it to HN front page - which I am not happy of. I want the stuff I build to be seen on the front page.
The way to do it _today_ requires enormous amounts of HBM! However, we've never designed inference accelerators, which is actually a quite "trivial" problem, but we've just never had a need.
Groq (acqui-hired by NVidia) came up with a different processor architecture: metric shit-tons of SRAM attached to a modest single core deterministic processor. No HBM needed on this card, and 32x faster inference than today's best GPUs at inference!
These LPUs are pretty useless for training though, which is useful for companies training models! Training is expensive, inference is cheap (someday, not now).
There's also a Canadian company that _literally burned the model as a silicon mask_ on a chip. It's unbelievably (1000x) fast, but not flexible of course: https://chatjimmy.ai
Strictly speaking there is that one startup that compiles entire models into huge ASIC. With trade off that entire hardware becomes outdated when new model version is released in 2-3 months.
Interesting that the 5h limits are raised, but if I understand announcement correctly, the weekly limit is not. So all this means is that you can burn through your weekly limit faster and be locked out entirely, or having to buy tokens
If Anthropic and SpaceX and OpenAI are all going public this year then this is a clever move to stick it to OpenAI. However, I'm kinda sus of my Claude subscription now
Hopefully they will work on response time. I've been noticing it taking 5+ minutes for each turn, for not complicated requests. Seems to vary based on time of day too.
Reading the comments here again surprises me how in an anti-Elon bubble most folks are. They are renting out spare Colossus 1 capacity. Colossus 2 is still coming online. Orbital data centers are really the plan in the next few years. XAi is still behind, but not a disaster considering how late they entered (and Elon’s unfortunate fixation on anime characters).
SpaceX is extremely uniquely positioned to crush the rest of the world combined in order to orbital data centers.
> SpaceX is extremely uniquely positioned to crush the rest of the world combined in order to orbital data centers
Sure, as long as your data center is 3x4m - size of a Starlink satellite (think Spinal Tap Stone Henge) . Anything bigger than that (i.e. actual data center sized) is going to require some assembly.
I've heard TeslaBot is good at folding shirts, and serving drinks (at least while teleoperated) - perhaps it can help?
AFAIK "orbital data centers" are a bunch of nonsense.
1. GPUs create heat. There's no efficient way to get rid of the heat in space (vacuum is an insulator).
2. Die-shrink makes modern processors and memory more and more susceptible to radiation; shielding is possible, but adds cost + mass (which adds cost)
I struggle to understand how orbital data centers can make sense. Is it mainly for continuous solar energy? Surely this can't be enough to offset the costs of launching?
Continuous 5x solar power (relative to on earth), no earthbound construction red tape or protestors, and yeah it can only possibly pencil out with Starship launching routinely. No other rocket system could even come close to making it work.
For context, xAI GPU utilization is at 11% and they're also expanding.[0] Renting one datacenter to Anthropic doesn't mean that they would be shutting xAI / Grok down.
I shared a couple of days ago why they were not doing like Google and offering oss models, but damn, offering Anthropic models after all the badmouthing. Next news: OpenAI models live on Colossus 2
I could have used this news 2 days ago. I've been trying out Claude Code for a few days and kept running into the limit, so I wanted to upgrade to Max. In the upgrade-flow they hit me with an identity verification through Persona. No problem, I thought, I'll just cancel the upgrade. Nope, all access to Claude Code on the old plan was now also blocked and can't be unblocked without completing Identity Verification, which I'll never do. What a bad experience.
On the plus-side, it told me how much cheaper Deepseek is and that it's on parity for reverse engineering work.
> First, we’re doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans.
Ok I guess, this was a bit of a hassle, but you're not increasing my weekly allowance, you're just not annoying me as often.
> Second, we’re removing the peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts.
It wasn't a limit reduction (as in, I didn't have a lower 5-hour limit), it was "tokens are more expensive" and it ate my weekly limits faster. This should never have been instituted to begin with.
> Third, we’re raising our API rate limits considerably for Claude Opus models, as shown in the table below:
Meh.
This is why I don't care for all the "it's a subscription, you're free to not use it!" arguments here. It's not an all-you-can-eat subscription with some generous fair use limits, it's a "X tokens per month for $Y", and they keep lowering the X unilaterally and in secret.
Is that what you do when you prepay for a year to get a discount and the supplier just says "oh I'll just give you half of what you paid for"? You "just move to pay again for the rest"?
What's going to be the hit on our atmosphere when the data centers re enter? I guess it won't matter as the AI will replace the humans by then for the GDP and tax base.
I mean, as someone who has the Max 20x plan and uses it only outside work (so I could not hit anywhere close to the weekly limit at all), I'll gladly take the 5-hour limit doubling.
My first impression to this post is "what the hell are they thinking?", but actually it seems like a decent move by them.
They basically made it so that normal users can better utilize their plan while not benefitting the backgroundagentmaxxers and stealth openclaw abusers in the ranks of their subscription audience. Making their plan more attractive to the people they actually want to sell to.
Hopefully this leads to a loosening of harness restrictions later.
> We’re very intentional about where we’ll add capacity—partnering with democratic countries whose legal and regulatory frameworks support investments of this scale, and where the supply chain on which our compute depends—hardware, networking, and facilities—will be secure.
*Buys compute from actual fascist Elon Musk in a failing democracy during the death throes of late state capitalism.
Oh what is that, the most "ethical" AI company on the planet making deals with literal democracy undermining fascists?
I'm starting to think the problem with "ethical" AI was always that no company could ever act ethically in the long term. They are and always will be a cancer to society and AI will only serve to amplify this further.
I’m sure that’ll comfort all the minorities affected by the rampant amplification of extremists on Twitter. I don’t disagree those are big achievements but also they’re irrelevant to those who feel the impact of Musk’s own extremism, and their lives would be unchanged if none of the Musk companies existed. If you’re unaffected by racism then it’s going to feel easy to only look at the positives of Musk.
I doubt it'll ever happen because heat dissipation will be a big problem, but this is likely in response to the proliferation of data centers. I would rather have data centers in space than convert countryside to concrete and metal jungles.
FTA: "SpaceX has done a lot of engineering work to make its Starlink satellites fainter. They are still too bright for research astronomy, but thanks to new coatings, their brightness has not increased dramatically even as SpaceX has launched larger and larger satellites."
Of course it’s a serious argument. Anyone using telescopes or doing Astro photography now sees Starlink satellites leaving trails all over the place. And that’s with a small number compared to the 1 million satellites they are proposing. It’s a public resource that a private company is stealing from all of us.
Models are a commodity, let's say Elon actually figures out building datacenters in space, or maybe he continues to be the leader of building earth based datacenters. Probably better business to not have yourself as your only customer. Dogfood, and open it to all.
The politics and economics of Musk throwing some support towards Anthropic is interesting (samma is probably pissed).
But, if you will pardon a little rant: I hate the idea of subscription inference plans and also 'dumping' by subsidizing non-profitable products. Inferencing should be pay as you go and dumping illegal.
Colossus 1 datacenter is the one using illegal power, is poisoning the air for poor communities near Memphis, and is potentially poisoning the water. It's likely the additional demand on the grid will cause massive blackouts during extreme weather events, putting residents at further risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)#Envir...
So you can put Anthropic on your list of companies that like to talk big about safety, but when the rubber hits the road, profits matter more than safety.
Illegal is a strong term here. While the wiki link you included indicates there might be some permitting nuances, I've seen nothing claiming the power is "illegal."
xAI removed its illegal gas turbines and obtained permits for the others only after being sued by the Southern Environmental Law Center. They then built another unpermitted site (Colossus 2) across the state line in Mississippi, and they are being sued again. [0]
"The company began operations at its first site, Colossus 1, in June of 2024 and used as many as 35 unpermitted gas turbines to power the facility. Despite receiving intense public pushback over the use of illegal turbines and the lack of public input and transparency around Colossus 1, xAI officials said it planned on “copying and pasting” its unlawful turbine strategy to power Colossus 2."
"xAI removed its unpermitted turbines at the Colossus 1 data center after SELC, on behalf of the NAACP, sent a notice of intent to sue under the Clean Air Act. The company obtained permits for its remaining 15 turbines."
[0] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
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The ethics are questionable, legal or not. Anthropic are tarnishing their image again here.
Not sure how much it hurts then compared to blocking openclaw though.
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from perplexity deep research: "Colossus‑related gas‑turbine power plants have been run in ways alleged to violate the Clean Air Act, in already over‑polluted Black and low‑income communities near Memphis, and Anthropic has now become the main user of that infrastructure."
sources: https://www.tba.org/?pg=Hastings2025AIX (Tech, Toxins, and Memphis: Evaluating the Environmental Footprint of the xAI Facility)
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I live in Memphis, none of this is true. What is true is that there is a concerted effort to smear anything related to xAI‘s presence in Memphis for some reason.
For some facts, the colossus data center is next-door to a steel mill and city sewage treatment plant, a vacated gigawatt scale coal power plant complete with nasty Coal Ash Ponds, and a brand new combined cycle gas power plant. The area is at the far edge of Memphis city limits up against the river, in a heavy industrial area. There’s even a major Valero oil refinery right there too.
Memphis has trillions and trillions of gallons of water, both in a gigantic underground aquifers and the Mississippi River itself. xAI has agreed to shed load in case of impending brownouts. The fear mongering is out of control.
They had a ton of portable turbines that were under operating under a temporary permit, and that was the disputed part. However, the blame should rest with TVA and or Memphis light gas and water for not being able to run an appropriate high voltage connection less than 1 mile from the plant to the data center in a timely manner. However… What difference does it make if the natural gas is burned at TVA plant or very similar gas turbines on site in the same neighborhood. Environmental groups and the county health department tried suing, was struck down, xAI works closely with the State, but the whining continues. xAI is paying gargantuan taxes to the city, no tax breaks.
These environmental groups do not care about the nasty unregulated cars burning oil, that I have to breathe every day. We terminated our motor vehicle inspection requirements due to the “burden” it places on the low income population. So they can burn their oil in my face, but then they sue to stop a SOTA turbine in an industrial area? There are junkyards in these same areas that burn their piles of waste tires every year or so “on accident”. No lawsuits there either.
Agreed there is a huge effort to smear as much as possible. Between parent comment being very highly voted and Wikipedia page being militantly updated and seeing these tired, wrong talking points everywhere, it's pretty obvious
> These environmental groups do not care about the nasty unregulated cars burning oil, that I have to breathe every day
That's a weird thing to say and makes me doubt everything else in your comment.
Just in case you were talking about some specific group I looked up who was doing the suing and they have lots of stuff about promoting trains and EVs etc.
They are literally suing the Trump administration (that Elon helped elect) on this topic.
> There are junkyards in these same areas that burn their piles of waste tires every year or so “on accident”. No lawsuits there either.
I wonder what drew xAI to this poorly regulated hellscape?
Also, one of the organisations suing xAI is also suing a) cement factories that burn tires for energy and b) tire companies that use the additive that kill salmon
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We have similar issues here in Wisconsin. Especially when it comes to solar and battery storage facilities. I absolutely think there needs to be more regulations carved out for data centers, just as there is for any other industrial building, but yeah the great mongering is incredible to see. Especially when the argument of "save our beautiful farmlands" is brought up. Do you even know how nasty agricultural runoff is?
Not every allegation that appears in print is true. One should be very skeptical about these kinds of allegations, especially when there are deep-pocketed corporations involved who can be sued or pressured to settle in the face of sufficiently "plausible and persistent" (to borrow Hazlitt's term) claims of harm done by their operations.
So I was just Googling this, and apparently most datacenters don't pay any state tax on revenue generated by said datacenter? Huge loophole if true, no wonder capital investment in datacenters is so high. [0]
[0] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/regulations/how-are-data...
I like how you said "googling this", but then didn't actually read the article you linked.
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it's in a former appliance factory that's right next to two pre-existing TVA power plants, a Nucor steel mill, and a sewage treatment facility. you've been lied to about how close it is to a residential area, just look at a map
"The independent study, conducted by EmPower Analytics Group and commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center, was led by a Harvard-trained environmental health scientist Dr. Michael Cork and shows that operation of xAI’s proposed permanent gas turbines would measurably increase health risks for families throughout the area—even in places as far away as Germantown and North Memphis." - https://www.memphiscap.org/
Air pollution travels.
> profits matter more than safety
For all the big talk from U.S.-Americans on European 'overregulation', they sure seem to have much more dystopian societal failure modes materialize.
How would a data centre poison the water? They don’t produce any chemicals or do anything.
> Data centers can inadvertently pollute water through chemical runoff from evaporative cooling systems, including biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals that accumulate at scale when facilities discharge up to 5 million gallons daily.
Source: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...
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This is the specific water pollution issue: https://www.protectouraquifer.org/issues/xai-supercomputer
The plan was to develop a recycled wastewater facility, which will pull arsenic from contaminated shallow acquifers, and pump that into the drinking water supply's acquifers.
Are you going to stop using Claude Code then?
Yes. Was that supposed to be a gotcha? Local models are becoming more useful, and I still remember how to write code.
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Get out of your bubble, my god.
Who cares about Memphis! We need more AI bro! /s
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"buddy" its so fitting your use of words for the complete lack of character buddy.
Anthropic renting out the data center Elon built for Grok is the kind of plot twist you can't make up.
Pretty smart for SpaceX though. They’re turning an asset they made for a money-pit (Grok) into probably a major source of revenue ahead of their IPO.
We all remember 2 weeks ago when SpaceX bought $10B of Cursor services. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855293
Since Cursor often relies on Claude models, some of those services will flow back to their own datacenter compute. Especially if there's, lets call it, "customer demand loadbalancing optimization agreements" that makes those Cursor services prioritize Claude models using the app keys that get load-balanced onto the SpaceX datacenter.
Did SpaceX just spend $10B to rent out its own datacenter, juicing their recurring revenue metrics with their own AI services investment?
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Sure, if "pretty smart" means overinvest in capital spending on an dirty datacenter powered by unpermitted gas generators that you don't even need anymore because of lack of demand for your product, so you lease it to a competitor (presumably at a huge loss). I am not sure that "major source of revenue" as a datacenter provider is the kind of growth opportunity that IPO investors are looking for.
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Its not even that. Its better to be involved in the game with a leader/help out a competitor who is competing against someone you don't like and don't want them to win, than to sit it out.
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The financials for a Musk company do not, and will not, affect investor sentiment in the slightest.
Investors in the SpaceX IPO are buying a call option on Musk.
The weird thing is, that the IPO might still work out for him and save his ass again.
At least he doesn't come across as a happy person...
While i'm really curious though when someone might hit him back after all the garbage he did and still does
I see it more of lets make money off the hardware we are not using anymore.
From Elon on X: ... After that, I was ok leasing Colossus 1 to Anthropic, as SpaceXAI had already moved training to Colossus 2.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2052069691372478511
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It was pretty obvious to me that the merger was a way of quietly shutting xAI down in a way that keeps investors happy. With it also being used as a vehicle to offload the Twitter debt to the public, he certainly has good accountants.
Yep - and in the meantime it's an asset of SpaceX to boost their IPO price, as long as this is done before people realize that xAI is apparently becoming a datacenter company not an AI one.
Then you've got SpaceX buying 1200 cybertrucks from Tesla, so it's serving as failure laundering vehicle for all his endeavors.
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Why would they spend 10B and potentially 60B in cursor if they were to shut xAI down? And I'm pretty sure Elon wants to have a model of his own, even if weaker, so it's "not woke".
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Yeah it's corporate subprime. Bundle a load of overpriced "assets" with made up valuations into something that's actually valuable, then shove it on the public markets so everyone has to buy it in their index trackers.
Not a merger, right, unless I missed something (admittedly skimming).
Plot twist but makes perfect sense for both companies.
Anthropic gets the compute they so desperately need to keep growing. Elon rents out compute that xAI couldn't make use of due to little demand for Grok. SpaceX gets revenue on the books for IPO.
PS. I want to translate this part:
To real speak:
>we'll even buy compute from China if we can sell Anthropic models there.
Considering that Anthropic mass-bans Chinese users accounts based on using VPN (used to circumvent the Chinese firewall) and then demands an ID or a residence permit of a country where Claude officially works to ensure that the user doesn't live in China, seems unlikely.
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Which naive souls are downvoting this? Anthropic is speed running Google's "don't be evil" mantra.
> funded by Middle East non-democratic governments
What's the problem here exactly? Are you insinuating any non-democratic government is bad and evil and only democratic governments are the correct and right way to govern? sort of like: "there is only one true prophet, and it's the one I follow, and all the others are false!"
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Don't forget the whole, "maybe this will make it easier for xAi to distill anthropic models and we can make another attempt at mechahitler"
Thank you for the "real speak" section. Accurate and hilarious.
Excess money and influence makes a lot of things possible. Evil or good, that's a separate discussion.
I'm just relieved to read that it isn't in fact...in space.
I'd rather it be in space than where it is now, poisoning people in the rural parts of Memphis with off-gassing from their methane turbines.
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SPAAAAAAAACEEEEEEEEEE (it is a Portal 2 space sphere reference)
> As part of this agreement, we have also expressed interest in partnering with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.
Anthropic is either taking this space business more serious than the general public, or posting this sentence was part of the deal to get the compute.
Anthropic needs any compute they can get. So if Elon wants to build orbital data centers Anthropic would be happy to run models on it. There isn't really any doubt Elon can build orbital data centers the question is if they are economical compared to earth based.
I love how this line of thinking completely avoids the issue re. improvements in local models.
I suppose if you are desperate to justify a large investment this what you would do - frame the story in a particular way.
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What are you talking about
There is no doubt that it's not a serious idea.
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> posting this sentence was part of the deal to get the compute
This 100%
Expressing an interest is presumably free... So anthropic might as well.
Source? I'd like to read more on Anthropic's views of space compute
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But also - anyone would be interested in purchasing orbital compute at the price Elon is quoting.
I don't think space compute is going to work out, but I would certainly say "yes happy to buy space compute from you in the future if you offer it at a good price"
If it happens it happens, if not, it doesn't.
It makes no sense. We're being presented with a forced choice -- put them in space, or put them in the middle of downtown Seattle.
This is stupid. I don't understand what's happening... specifically, what mental virus is spreading that lowers everybody's IQ by 10-20 points, evidently including my own. Put the data centers in the ocean, powered by solar and networked with Starlink or LEO. Put them in the desert. Put them 20 miles south of Nowhere, Idaho.
But space?!
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> or posting this sentence was part of the deal to get the compute
All it says is expressed interest.
That's like asking a casual how are you...
Ehh, I think they are just "kissing the ring". This was part of the agreement for the terrestrial datacenter access, pretend like the space orbital compute is more than the boondoggle that it clearly is.
I want to be clear, I do think that one day something like that will exist, I just don't think it's anywhere close to being a reality, much like FSD.
Also it costs them, almost [0], nothing to say it and then later come up with some reason why they are no longer interested.
[0] Maybe a little bit of respect
most of the big tech ceos have mentioned this.
Most big tech CEOs are people that only "succeeded" due to have an unregulated monopoly or picking the right lotto ticket and not due to any innate above average intelligence. Go look at the 100s of billions in wasted capital and tell me who benefitted from such waste while workers + children suffer from lack of medical care.
You honestly expect this trajectory to continue unabated?
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It’s weird to not take this seriously. It’s obvious it’s serious and they’re pursuing it.
The whole armchair engineer debate online about this is hilarious
I'm just a software engineer, all I need to know is SpaceX is aggressively pursuing this - that's enough for me to believe it's viable
SpaceX operates literally orders of magnitudes more satellites than anyone else. If anybody understands the physics and engineering of space compute, it's SpaceX. Lay people debating this online is just showing their ignorance as far as I'm concerned, and it mostly comes from an emotional place of wanting Musk enterprises to fail
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Thank you for a reasonable comment. I know internet people love to comment on how "dumb" things are, but we're seeing a growing group of funded, motivated, and intelligent people working towards a common goal. It's at least something to be curious about, I wish the comments were more oriented towards in-depth discussions on the actual current blockers.
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Has anthropic said Elon is evil or why else is this relevant?
Ironically it is Elon who has said that anthropic is evil:
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-teams-up-with-anthropic-a-comp...
And if you need to be reminded: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
They're in every discussion even remotely related to anything Elon Musk.
Everything Elon does is somehow stupid or evil. Actually, that reminds me of Thunderf00t YouTube streams where he was (or still is?) betting Starship would fail miserably every test flight, and he'd talk about how evil and stupid Elon is for 3 hours with chatters, watch the flight then say something like "it's still bullshit."
I think it's a mixture of cope and a little bit psyop from adversaries like Russia who are being crippled in Ukraine because of Starlink.
Anybody who spends 5 minutes on reddit outside of pornographic or cuckoldry subs knows that this is not a serious idea
Doubling the five-hour rate limits is merely a marketing stunt if the weekly rates are not also doubled. It simply means that you can reach the weekly limits in three days instead of five.
I have never come close to my weekly limit, but have hit my hourly limit frequently.
Same. I hit limits after 45 minutes. I'm on a measly Pro plan. I'm usually building small, open source projects, often from scratch. I only work on these projects in a 2-hour window in the morning. This is my "free time" development. I hope this change helps, because I was days away from switching back to Codex, though I like Claude Code a bit better these days.
I also hope that the fact I had OpenClaw in my sandbox once is not why I hit these limits so damn fast. I don't use it anymore and I've tried to rid my sandbox of anything "openclaw" but it is in my git history in various places on various projects. Claude doesn't seem to be transparent about this limitation.
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For me it's the opposite. I almost never hit hourly limit, but I hit weekly limit in about 5 days.
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That’s because the week ends before you can use them because you’re waiting for your hourly resets. Now the week essentially got longer with the same limit
I hit my weekly limit in 3 days this week. Irregularly do in 5. With the top MAX sub.
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same, I struggle to use more than half of my weekly, even if I max out my 5-hour windows regularly during the day.
For me personally, I have the basic Claude Code subscription that I use to rewind on some evenings or on weekend, to code a bit for 1-2 hours. I have like 3-5 session with it every week.
The 5h windows are frustrating because I can go through them quickly if I have a more complex task. I haven't yet met the weekly limit. I'd say there are many cases similar to mine.
I disagree. I routinely hit the 5 hour limit on Pro with Opus 4.7 just trying to have it do one design task or comprehensive code review on a large PR, and the worst part is, the overhead and bringing all that context back into another 5 hour window blows through 30%+ of my 5 hour usage limit.
I don’t think I’ve hit either limit a single time in the past 5 months after upgrading to the $100 plan.
On heavy weeks I probably am using it consistently for at least 6+ hours a day.
Although, I’m pretty rigorous about always keeping my sessions under 200-250k tokens.
I've maxed out weekly limits for 2 $200 accounts before
I've found with opus 4.6 which im still stubbornly using i can burn about 10% of the weekly within a 5 hour window with my workflow.
Mentally i think about the weekly usage in terms of usage per day so about 14% per day which results in me not using that much early in the week so i can kinda "burn freely" later on. which leads me to a spot where usually on the final two days im sorta thinking about how can i expend that usage ive "saved".
the 5 hour windows make this harder, sometimes the final day of the week im trying to get that 10% in every 5 hour window of my waking hours and i HATE that, i wanna work when i am most productive, not around some ridiculous window of time, i dont wanna think "I am gonna be utilizing claude the most around 11am so i should send a dumb message to haiku to get my 5 hour window started at 7:30am so i can have it roll over at 12:30."
So im happy about this change sure. But it is 100% them creating a problem and pretending having some relief from that problem is them doing their users a favor. I understand they are doing it to lower peak hours usage and all that, I still despise it.
People are waisting tokens by using Opus for everything.
Using Advisor [1], you can use Sonnet most of time; Sonnet can handoff work it can't handle to Opus. When Opus is done, you automatically go back to Sonnet.
[1]: https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/claude-code-advisor-strategy-...
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> Mentally i think about the weekly usage in terms of usage per day so about 14% per day
20%, there are 5 work days in a week, not 7.
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Exactly, the weekly limits are the real limiting factor. If you really push it, you can easily hit the weekly $200/mo Max limit in a day.
5 hours were the painful ones. If you're hitting your weekly you've outgrown the sub and should use extra billing
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It's not, because I've never hit my weekly limits because of the very restrictive 5 hours limits. Let's see if I really hit my weekly limits now.
However you see it, it's an improvement for the consumer.
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Who cares about rate limits if they serve your prompt using dumbed down model.
>Higher usage limits
>The following three changes—all effective today—are aimed at improving the experience of using Claude for our most dedicated customers.
>First, we’re doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans.
>Second, we’re removing the peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts.
>Third, we’re raising our API rate limits considerably for Claude Opus models,
Looks like Elon's finally giving up on XAI and just selling the compute
> Looks like Elon's finally giving up on XAI and just selling the compute
I don't think that's certain yet, but I do think that the open-source models like Gemma and Qwen are getting so good so fast that even Anthropic has real risk around the long-term value of their models and tooling.
Basically, if I'm Anthropic or xAI, I try to get revenue whenever and wherever possible and see what sticks. There's no value in playing for monopolistic control when everything is so volatile.
There's always money in the giggawatt datacenter
I don't know if it relates to the same data centers, but this also comes hours after several still recent Grok models were deprecated at short notice. Grok 4.1 Fast is the cheapest way to do research on X (cheaper than the X API!) and it's gone on May 15: https://docs.x.ai/developers/models - freeing up compute to sell?
Fuck, I loved grok 4.1, it was a really capable model for the money.
I'd run agents consuming hundreds of millions of tokens for less than a hundred dollars.
Unlikely, because xAI had huge amount of overcapacity.
Probably a good idea in all honesty. xAI is a deeply unserious lab
From a technical standpoint xAI is basically Gemini team B who were give A+ salaries to join the company.
But even then, I suspect their hands were tied in some areas because Elon had some expectations from his AI.
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There's only so much determinism you can create when you try not to filter (read CENSOR) your LLM.
The details are secret. It very well could be wasted GPU time but Anthropic could have made a killer offering as well.
I'm just speculating, but a particularly killer offering Elon wouldnt be able to refuse would be if Anthropic agreed to give them some training data / technology.
Billions in revenue just before your IPO isn't a bad deal either.
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Giving Musk the benefit of the doubt, here's a thought experiment: It doesn't seem like any of the big labs in the US can keep a lead for more than 3 months. The Chinese models are closing in. Even if xAI comes up with the best model, so what?
On the other hand, power and compute are limited. Ridiculous as orbital compute sounds, land/power on earth is not easily scalable. There are too many limiting factors, chief among which in the US is regulation. But in space, if you make one satellite work, you just get more resources and launch more. This also leads naturally to Tesla's plan for a chip fab.
So if you squint, Musk might not be that crazy.
No I don't ever give up. I would have to be dead or completely incapacitated.
-Elon
https://x.com/XFreeze/status/2012390928221094335
I don't think this is giving up. He's getting inside information on how Claude works, and a huge stream of Claude usage data. This will all inform future grok development, IMO.
question is, will they buy cursor?
Or he just got leverage on a competitor
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> 300 megawatts of new capacity (over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs)
The scale is just mindboggling here. Are there any blog posts or anything discussing what kind of infrastructure is used for even just the inference side (nevermind the training) for SotA models like Opus? I would have thought it might be secret, but given that you can actually run the models yourself on AWS Bedrock doesn't that give an indication?
I know you're probably talking about the compute infrastructure, but I think the electricity infrastructure side is interesting too, data centers are doing things in dumb ways because the need for operational expansion speed is greater than the need dollars:
> It’s regulation with the utilities. There are ramp rates, there are all of these things that you’re supposed to do to not screw up the grid. Data centers have been in gross violation of that. When you think about what’s wrong with data centers, they have load volatility, which we just talked about, then they decide to power it with behind-the-meter natural gas generators. These natural gas generators, their shaft is supposed to last for seven years. It’s lasting 10 months because of all the cycling.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/doing-data-centers-the-not-dumb-way
On the compute infrastructure, there are standard NVIDIA reference designs like this:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/technologies/enterprise-referen...
I haven't bothered to look but I'd guess Mellanox GPU-to-GPU networks, and massive custom code for splitting tensors across GPUs, and for shuttling activations across GPU nodes.
> but given that you can actually run the models yourself on AWS Bedrock
That's not exactly how it works. Anthropic are hosting their models in AWS Bedrock as a managed service. Customers call those LLMs just like calling any other API. There's no visibility into what kind of AWS infrastructure is serving that API request.
Probably the best source https://jax-ml.github.io/scaling-book/
All evidence is that the final training runs across thousands to low tens of thousands of GPU, and that a single instance of the resulting model runs (or could run) well within a rack (ie NVL72).
The massive scale is all massively parallel: test-time compute for users, test time compute for RL rollouts (and probably increasingly environments for those rollouts), other synthetic data generation, research experiments, …
> 300 megawatts of new capacity (over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs)
That’s just for the SpaceX part (over provisioning for grok, lol).
The Amazon and Google deals are each over an order of magnitude larger! Pretty wild indeed!
How many instances of Doom can it run though?
Limits were the last straw that made me cancel my subscription and make my workflow completely model agnostic with pi.
While this is good news, I'm not coming back. Anthropic just lost me with too many wrongs in too short of a time period.
Opus has been replaced with GPT 5.5, DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen and they all allow me to use my own, single harness and switch models easily if any of them start treating me the same.
I wouldn't make any grand stand declarations like this honestly. The models themselves are all hot swappable with minimum effort. The AI labs american or chinese don't really have a moat. Today anthropic is bad and openai is good. Last month it was the other way around. Next month it may be google.
The only certainty is that you can swap models quickly and painlessly.
Same, though I'm reconsidering, in light of the recent bugs (which can happen to any provider) and the increased limits. I guess that's at least 3x more Opus for my usecase.
Say what you like about Sam Altman, but given how Anthropic is scrambling to sign capacity deals for compute we can sure say he was right about the capcity build out needed.
That’s correct, but from what I understand his move was also strategic: to choke the market.
Having said that, Anthropic’s position is fully understandable, as Sam took a very large risk here, and OpenAI’s future is all but certain.
Scrambling? Seems to me xAI built too much capacity (for what they can use in 2026). Does that mean OpenAI built the right amount? I don't see how this proves that just because we see one AI company willing to sell compute. We don't even know the terms/pricing.
> Scrambling?
Yes.
To quote:
> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said his company tried to plan for 10-fold growth. But revenue and usage increased 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis, which he says explains why it’s been so hard to keep up with demand.
> “That is the reason we have had difficulties with compute,” Amodei said Wednesday at his company’s developer conference in San Francisco. Amodei added that the company is “working as quickly as possible to provide more” capacity and will “pass that compute on to you as soon as we can.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/06/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-s...
I think "scrambling" is a fair characterization of the CEO saying "we have had difficulties with compute" and "working as quickly as possible to provide more"
They've also signed new compute deals with Google and AWS recently.
Or the bubble he was pumping hasn't popped yet. We won't be able to say how much of this capacity was actually "needed" until 10 years in the future, if ever.
The point is that Anthropic is already a decent way into eating through all that capacity, and it's based on real revenue.
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> First, we’re doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans.
The fine-print-omission appears to be that weekly limits are not doubled. The progressive 5-hour rate limit shrinking was indeed an efficiency blocker that finally convinced me to cancel, but being only able to get 4 full sessions a week as opposed to 8 doesn't compell me to resubscribe.
For my hobbyist purposes Deepseek v4 Flash has replaced Claude Code because I was also sick of hitting 5 hour limits with Claude. Right now, the only thing I miss from Claude is multi-modal image support. I can work around no image support since I can use v4 Flash all day and spend around $1. I am aware Deepseek is currently discounting their API at 75% off so I may try out another provider once the discount is gone at the end of the month.
At this point if feels like if you properly scope your work open weight LLMs are adequate.
The 75% discount only applies to Deepseek v4 Pro. Flash will stay the same price after the discount ends. It's remarkably cheap for what it delivers.
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing
Ouch, I wasn't aware they were discounting so much. There goes my subscription escape plan.
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The datacenter isn't operational yet, they don't magically get more processing instantly after signing a deal.
Well, this sucks :/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)#Envir...
One of the reasons I refuse to use xAI’s models is because of the outsized negative environmental impacts of the methane gas turbines.
Now I have to avoid Claude too.
If you can make up an inconsequential arbitrary rationalization to not use a service then I’m sure you can do the opposite to convince yourself to use it.
That’s what virtue signaling is I guess - the action you’re taking is pointless, the only point is to tell everyone you’re taking it therefore feed the narrative forward?
The entire economy runs off gas turbines though this is the thing you boycott?
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You realize natural gas is one of the more environmentally friendly methods of generating power. Lots of work went into moving to natural gas generation to improve the environmental impact for electricity generation.
This is nothing like burning coal.
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Why?
I think he's referring to the fact that Colossus is powered by fossil fuels.
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They're doubling the five hour limits, but no mention about the weekly limit. So overall it's the same maximum usage, right?
I think so, but that's also really great because I frequently run into the five hour caps, but very rarely use my entire weekly allotment. There are lots of situations where I do things like write the plan for all the work that has to get done, and then set a reminder to execute the plan after I get home, when I'm done making dinner (because e.g. my five hour cap ends at 6pm). Higher caps for the five hour period is a lot more convenient.
I (and many others) are the opposite. I run out of quota is 4-5 days. Generally no issues with the 5hr cap. ($200 sub)
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If this logic applied, then there would be no purpose in them having the 5 hourly limit.
The purpose is to control the total amount of requests they need to handle in a given timeframe. If everyone could use up their whole weekly limit in 5 hours, many would do so, thus pushing the GPU/TPU clusters to or above their capacity limits.
Some get the reset, some don't it seems :(
"All of [SpaceX]'s compute capacity at Colossus 1"
SpaceX/xAI also has Colossus 2, with double or more the GPUs
Seems xAI will still be around
That is one take, but here is how I interpret it. They spent a lot of money training a model which isn't doing enough inference to justify continuing to use those GPUs, and now they are buying even more GPUs to build an even bigger model that also won't be very popular.
Oh. Just as I'm in the process of migrating to Pi+Qwen (local). This was probably going to be my last month on the Pro sub as I'm seriously fed up with the limits and degradation that started weeks after I signed up. Let's see how this shakes out.
How does Pi+Qwen (local) compare to Anthropic's offerings? Surely you're not getting the same breadth and quality of output using Qwen? How is the performance?
So far I've only really set things up and done some benchmarking (a set of capability prompts created and evaluated by Claude, HumanEval and MBPP; haven't completed the latter 2) on several local models (Qwen 1.7b, 4b, 9b & 35b a3b; 1.7b got 6/8 correct at ~14.7 tok/s on the capability set, to 35b for 8/8 at ~4.5 tok/s; can share full results if interested), and setup llama-swap so I can dynamically select them. I'll need to decide which of my projects I'll be really testing them on, with the awareness that I'll have to be even more involved.
It’s a toy compared to Opus or Sonnet. Obviously the 5 trillion parameter models running on $$$$ hardware is going to outperform a local model.
we all are. thank god for alibaba, seems all that crap we bought from aliexpress served some indirect purpose.
I wonder if it's just Elon realising that xAI can't beat OpenAI and thus deciding to give all his compute capacity to Anthropic instead.
Certainly an interesting day for xAI.
Building datacenters plays to his strengths. It's a good partnership if he can stomach it.
As long as it keeps Altman awake at night, it's all good I believe for Elon.
I would think that stomaching Musk would be the hard part. Just goes to show how compute-constrained Anthropic is at this time.
He literally did a Nazi salute on stage, twice! Check the video, and tell me what you see.
edit: https://giphy.com/gifs/elon-musk-nazi-salute-8W0ItVv7T1kRdwb...
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this feels more like something designed to bolster the spacex ipo than anything else
300MW is peanuts compared to their multiple 50GW+ deals to the point you start to wonder why just 300MW is making the difference in their capacity that they can increase limits this much... also, why couldn't their many existing multi billion dollar deals not allow them to expand capacity?
when you take this into account, then you read their statement about orbital compute it starts to smell quite fishy
The difference is the 300 MW are real, the 50GW are printed on some paper and don’t exist.
There aren’t that many 300MW+ datacenter in the world, relative to the capacity Anthropic has online, it’s a lot, probably in the 20% range.
What's the current status of the 'biggest computer wins' vs. specialized proprietary research/data in the AI arms race? People had such high hopes for xAI because of the monster machine Elon built. Or has xAI just turned over too much staff too quickly?
Wouldn't trust them not to take a copy and use it to distill. Wonder what security there is
I want to believe. A couple of weeks ago I fell into this "trap", they offered a similar thing. I subscribed to the Pro Plan. Had fun for a couple of weeks and then I entered frustration phase. I love the product, but I hate those up and downs. My rant made it to HN front page - which I am not happy of. I want the stuff I build to be seen on the front page.
This is where I see the economy of AI going:
* Inference becomes cheap
- speciality accelerators hit the market and race to the bottom begins
* Training remains expensive
- This works out for Anthropic/OpenAI, they go into the business of training
* Models become rental units or purchasable assets, you run on inference hardware
- Rent or own inference hardware
* Or you pay someone to do all of the above for you, at a premium
There's no magic bullet for inference on cheap accelerators. Any accelerator will still require large amounts of high bandwidth memory.
The way to do it _today_ requires enormous amounts of HBM! However, we've never designed inference accelerators, which is actually a quite "trivial" problem, but we've just never had a need.
Groq (acqui-hired by NVidia) came up with a different processor architecture: metric shit-tons of SRAM attached to a modest single core deterministic processor. No HBM needed on this card, and 32x faster inference than today's best GPUs at inference!
These LPUs are pretty useless for training though, which is useful for companies training models! Training is expensive, inference is cheap (someday, not now).
There's also a Canadian company that _literally burned the model as a silicon mask_ on a chip. It's unbelievably (1000x) fast, but not flexible of course: https://chatjimmy.ai
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Strictly speaking there is that one startup that compiles entire models into huge ASIC. With trade off that entire hardware becomes outdated when new model version is released in 2-3 months.
Interesting that the 5h limits are raised, but if I understand announcement correctly, the weekly limit is not. So all this means is that you can burn through your weekly limit faster and be locked out entirely, or having to buy tokens
Anthropic taketh and Anthropic giveth.
Exactly.
Today they say this, then tomorrow they'll silently reduce limits and argue with anyone who calls them on it.
This is obviously because of the new compute deal. I don't see them going back unless prosumer demand outgrows compute again.
If Anthropic and SpaceX and OpenAI are all going public this year then this is a clever move to stick it to OpenAI. However, I'm kinda sus of my Claude subscription now
Hopefully they will work on response time. I've been noticing it taking 5+ minutes for each turn, for not complicated requests. Seems to vary based on time of day too.
Reading the comments here again surprises me how in an anti-Elon bubble most folks are. They are renting out spare Colossus 1 capacity. Colossus 2 is still coming online. Orbital data centers are really the plan in the next few years. XAi is still behind, but not a disaster considering how late they entered (and Elon’s unfortunate fixation on anime characters).
SpaceX is extremely uniquely positioned to crush the rest of the world combined in order to orbital data centers.
> SpaceX is extremely uniquely positioned to crush the rest of the world combined in order to orbital data centers
Sure, as long as your data center is 3x4m - size of a Starlink satellite (think Spinal Tap Stone Henge) . Anything bigger than that (i.e. actual data center sized) is going to require some assembly.
I've heard TeslaBot is good at folding shirts, and serving drinks (at least while teleoperated) - perhaps it can help?
Orbital DCs is blocked on starship because they _arent_ doing starlink sized satellites.
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AFAIK "orbital data centers" are a bunch of nonsense.
1. GPUs create heat. There's no efficient way to get rid of the heat in space (vacuum is an insulator). 2. Die-shrink makes modern processors and memory more and more susceptible to radiation; shielding is possible, but adds cost + mass (which adds cost)
I struggle to understand how orbital data centers can make sense. Is it mainly for continuous solar energy? Surely this can't be enough to offset the costs of launching?
Continuous 5x solar power (relative to on earth), no earthbound construction red tape or protestors, and yeah it can only possibly pencil out with Starship launching routinely. No other rocket system could even come close to making it work.
See the recent Dwarkesh interview with Elon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA
For those who haven't been following the build out.
xAI has added about 500MW of nvidia gpu capacity in ~April
and will add another 500MW before the end of the year totaling about 2GW.
Source on this?
Following various X posts, asking Grok to check my memory. https://grokipedia.com/page/Colossus_supercomputer backs this up.
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"use all of the compute capacity at their Colossus 1 data center"
So, they handed out all of their data center to Anthropic; Grok wasn't using it much?
Moved to Colossus 2. Though I guess you could still frame it as 'don't they need Collosus 1 AND 2' if you want...
For context, xAI GPU utilization is at 11% and they're also expanding.[0] Renting one datacenter to Anthropic doesn't mean that they would be shutting xAI / Grok down.
[0] https://wccftech.com/xai-using-just-11-percent-gpus-while-me...
11% is the MFU. Not how many GPUs are running. Big misunderstanding.
does that mean this data center was way overprovisionedo or that grok is barely used and they could potentially kill it and just use claude?
As a bonus, it looks like they reset limits a few minutes ago -- I went from 53% of my weekly allotment to 0%.
Not for me. 2 Claude Max 20x accounts here both at high usage on weekly allotments.
Too little, too late. I'd rather have a consistent, dumber model than sometimes excellent but often miserable Claude.
Staying with Claude is like going back to the restaurant where you got food poisoning: you kinda get what you deserve next time you get sick.
I shared a couple of days ago why they were not doing like Google and offering oss models, but damn, offering Anthropic models after all the badmouthing. Next news: OpenAI models live on Colossus 2
It's been a day or so and I don't see any change at https://usage.report/
These energy figures are gigantic. It's getting absurd.
> Within the month
To me this is the mind-bending piece. It's not a like a datacenter has a plug-and-play with well written spec and an international standard interface.
I could have used this news 2 days ago. I've been trying out Claude Code for a few days and kept running into the limit, so I wanted to upgrade to Max. In the upgrade-flow they hit me with an identity verification through Persona. No problem, I thought, I'll just cancel the upgrade. Nope, all access to Claude Code on the old plan was now also blocked and can't be unblocked without completing Identity Verification, which I'll never do. What a bad experience.
On the plus-side, it told me how much cheaper Deepseek is and that it's on parity for reverse engineering work.
> First, we’re doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans.
Ok I guess, this was a bit of a hassle, but you're not increasing my weekly allowance, you're just not annoying me as often.
> Second, we’re removing the peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts.
It wasn't a limit reduction (as in, I didn't have a lower 5-hour limit), it was "tokens are more expensive" and it ate my weekly limits faster. This should never have been instituted to begin with.
> Third, we’re raising our API rate limits considerably for Claude Opus models, as shown in the table below:
Meh.
This is why I don't care for all the "it's a subscription, you're free to not use it!" arguments here. It's not an all-you-can-eat subscription with some generous fair use limits, it's a "X tokens per month for $Y", and they keep lowering the X unilaterally and in secret.
People are so cynical on HN. Just move to API billing if not getting enough subsidized compute is that big a deal for you?
Is that what you do when you prepay for a year to get a discount and the supplier just says "oh I'll just give you half of what you paid for"? You "just move to pay again for the rest"?
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So, when you use Claude Code from now on, you will be poisoning people in the rural parts of Memphis with xAIs unpermitted gas generators.
Oh is this the polluting gas powered data centre Elon made, that's making local residents unhealthy ?
This might be a good time to drop Claude.
Anthropic looking to garner some good will after the recent issues. I’ll gladly take the higher rate limits
I would gladly take a worse experience than to have my favored LLM vendor partner with an Elon company.
Not surprising, considering the recent news that xai only utilized 11% of their GPU's.
xAI (part of SpaceX) using just 11 percent of GPUs[1]
1. https://wccftech.com/xai-using-just-11-percent-gpus-while-me...
I would have preferred an increase in the weekly limits instead of the 5-hour limits.
How do you select your data center like you can for AWS and Google Cloud?
Hopefully this filters through to Copilot's recent rate-limits
Well, that's super disappointing :(
I have got xAI blocked in OpenRouter as I do not want to support any business controlled by Musk.
What does SpaceX get out of this deal?
What GPUs does Colossus run? Old H100s?
For a space that supposedly had "no moat", the number of players still competing for frontier models seems to be shrinking pretty fast
What's going to be the hit on our atmosphere when the data centers re enter? I guess it won't matter as the AI will replace the humans by then for the GDP and tax base.
I mean, as someone who has the Max 20x plan and uses it only outside work (so I could not hit anywhere close to the weekly limit at all), I'll gladly take the 5-hour limit doubling.
My first impression to this post is "what the hell are they thinking?", but actually it seems like a decent move by them.
They basically made it so that normal users can better utilize their plan while not benefitting the backgroundagentmaxxers and stealth openclaw abusers in the ranks of their subscription audience. Making their plan more attractive to the people they actually want to sell to.
Hopefully this leads to a loosening of harness restrictions later.
> We’re very intentional about where we’ll add capacity—partnering with democratic countries whose legal and regulatory frameworks support investments of this scale, and where the supply chain on which our compute depends—hardware, networking, and facilities—will be secure.
*Buys compute from actual fascist Elon Musk in a failing democracy during the death throes of late state capitalism.
They say usage limits on the 5h increased, but I don’t see a significant difference on the x20 plan.
Oh what is that, the most "ethical" AI company on the planet making deals with literal democracy undermining fascists?
I'm starting to think the problem with "ethical" AI was always that no company could ever act ethically in the long term. They are and always will be a cancer to society and AI will only serve to amplify this further.
Insert gaping soyjak face.
Anthropic aligning with the guy who got Trump elected means they are dead to me.
I'm posting immediately after cancelling my claude subscriptions.
I mean... seems like a no-brainer
So now Elon Musk gets to read all of our Claude conversations?? :-(
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CEO that accelerated eletric car industry by 10 years
CEO that accelerated space industry by 10+ years
CEO that accelerated HCI industry by 10 years
I’m sure that’ll comfort all the minorities affected by the rampant amplification of extremists on Twitter. I don’t disagree those are big achievements but also they’re irrelevant to those who feel the impact of Musk’s own extremism, and their lives would be unchanged if none of the Musk companies existed. If you’re unaffected by racism then it’s going to feel easy to only look at the positives of Musk.
A person can do good and bad things.
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Pablo Escobar built hospitals. Ted Bundy saved lives on a suicide hotline
so what?
Nobody is 100% evil
Musk helped dismantling USAID which leads to many people’s death.
> CEO that accelerated eletric car industry by 10 years
China was doing this regardless. It was a national security issue for them.
I doubt it'll ever happen because heat dissipation will be a big problem, but this is likely in response to the proliferation of data centers. I would rather have data centers in space than convert countryside to concrete and metal jungles.
Once they send the cooling water up into orbit, it's gone for good
"HN pretends that companies have morals: Part 48,037,986"
Counterpoint: Valve
Which is kind of like the exception that proves the rule hahaha
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It is very much a valid argument. SpaceX has been working on this issue for years.
https://theconversation.com/a-million-new-spacex-satellites-...
FTA: "SpaceX has done a lot of engineering work to make its Starlink satellites fainter. They are still too bright for research astronomy, but thanks to new coatings, their brightness has not increased dramatically even as SpaceX has launched larger and larger satellites."
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Of course it’s a serious argument. Anyone using telescopes or doing Astro photography now sees Starlink satellites leaving trails all over the place. And that’s with a small number compared to the 1 million satellites they are proposing. It’s a public resource that a private company is stealing from all of us.
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Give them whatever they need. Time to go to the moon.
Models are a commodity, let's say Elon actually figures out building datacenters in space, or maybe he continues to be the leader of building earth based datacenters. Probably better business to not have yourself as your only customer. Dogfood, and open it to all.
> Elon actually figures out
Elon doesn't figure out anything. He pays people to do it and then tries to take the credit.
The first is impossible and the second isn't happening and won't happen.
I wouldn’t say impossible but not effective
the leader of building earth-based datacenters lol
what are we even talking about
The politics and economics of Musk throwing some support towards Anthropic is interesting (samma is probably pissed).
But, if you will pardon a little rant: I hate the idea of subscription inference plans and also 'dumping' by subsidizing non-profitable products. Inferencing should be pay as you go and dumping illegal.