Comment by jprd
2 hours ago
Right. This compute still being powered by an illegal amount of gas turbines in a residential neighborhood?
Claude is eating so much compute, the threat of that power being tuned down by lawsuit (rightfully) is worth the risk to Anthropic in the short-term. Instead of declaring "bubble", I'm just going to say that's so crazy.
Colossus 1 is in an industrial area, next door to a grid scale natural gas power plant. One that's fully operational.
Then why do they keep getting sued, then going one state over and running the same playbook that got them sued in the previous state?
https://naacp.org/articles/naacp-sues-xai-illegal-pollution-...
Because they have two compute clusters? Colossus 1 and Colossus 2?
If your impression was that they went "we're done here", packed up and left, you're wrong. They're both operating and expanding their operations. And fighting environmental activists in court while at it.
Which I respect them for. "Environmental activists" are scum of the earth, as a rule, and "pay some activists to sue your competition" is a true time-honored classic of grey area legal warfare. SpaceX had to deal with that long before they merged with xAI - pretty much every time they built or expanded infrastructure.
Anyone can sue anyone for anything, and only the truly asinine lawsuits get thrown out pre-emptively, so "getting sued by environmental activists" is a more reliable indicator of "they're building something" and "they're stepping on some bigwig's toes" than it is of any "environmental damage". Tactics like this are a part of why US is a lousy place to build infrastructure in.
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Or SpaceX is absorbing the risk should that power be turned off... still morally shitty but not obviously economically so.