Why do you say that? I was under the impression that everyone in the datacenter business was printing money.
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?
It is publicly known that the vast majority of deals in the AI space are circular in nature without the need for explicitly encoding any of it in a legal contract or even tacit agreements.
e.g. Nvidia has invested significantly in many AI companies including both Anthropic and OpenAI which rely heavily on Nvidia's hardware and will undoubtedly use some of said investment towards that end.
SpaceX is getting dressed for their debutante ball and is putting on the makeup to make a grand entrance on the auction floor.
Is there a difference? I legitimately have no idea. You are right that we can add another entry to the list of interconnected circular dealmakings. All this ain't gonna end well next time the music stops playing.
From Elon on X: ... After that, I was ok leasing Colossus 1 to Anthropic, as SpaceXAI had already moved training to Colossus 2.
Then you've got SpaceX buying 1200 cybertrucks from Tesla, so it's serving as failure laundering vehicle for all his endeavors.
Which would be fine to me if Tesla wasn't a publicly traded company and SpaceX wasn't about to IPO. Whereas juicing companies in a way that affects the open stock market feels very inappropriate.
And now SpaceX investors are going to be left as the bag holders for X.ai/Twitter.
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
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.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.
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!"
My point is that Anthropic cares a lot about "democracy" but will buy compute from a data center mostly funded by non-democratic nations.
America could do so much to compel the world to work in from a human rights perspective rather than petrodollars. I can't imagine any serious person would say the average American benefits from US imperialism. All US politicians did was traded away were secure middle class lifestyle for cheaper widgets, hardly anything worth caring about.
Who benefits from American petrodollar policies? Not Americans, all the wealth gets extracted to the elites while civilians suffer from the imperial blowback/boomerang.
Look at what the new deal coalition brought in and they nearly burnt out enough to allow neoliberalism to flourish during their fall. What do we have in return? No universal healthcare, no universal childcare, a broken welfare system, increasing income inequality, losing the ability to make a better life.
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?
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
sources: https://www.tba.org/?pg=Hastings2025AIX (Tech, Toxins, and Memphis: Evaluating the Environmental Footprint of the xAI Facility)
"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...
CO2 is bad for us long term. But there are plenty of other nasty combustion products that are extremely bad for humans in the short term. Which is why we have pollution and air quality regulations.
Portable generators don’t meet any of the stronger requirements that utility scale systems have to meet, because it’s assumed they’re only operated in small numbers for short periods of time. They’re not designed to safe to operate in large numbers over long periods of time in the same place. For that you need proper pollution controls
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/xai-is-facing-a-lawsuit-fo...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
[2] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
Not sure how much it hurts then compared to blocking openclaw though.
[0] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/regulations/how-are-data...
> Thus, when it comes to income tax, at least, many data centers – especially hyperscale data centers owned by large companies – don’t generate tax revenue because they don’t generate direct operating income.
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.
There is no doubt that it's not a serious idea.
That claim seems reasonable. I have zero knowledge of the economics of launching and maintaining satellites though.
That leaves only two kinds of people left who are still talking excitedly about datacenters in space: The uninformed and the grifters.
There’s very little research work needed to make this happen; it’s all about engineering some satellite buses and having them fly in close formation to get a “data center”. And this group of satellites in sun-synchronous orbit would relay to a comms constellation e.g. starlink itself) and operate as a global scale data center. The heat management and orbital mechanics are all straight forward really.
AI calcs may handle wrong calculations better than cpus where software will tend to panic.
How much power do starlink sats draw and how does it compare to say 8x H200s?
27,500 satellites need launching - fast! - just for Claude to meet a demand spike?
Its still very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more.
All that gets you 70kW of cooling. Radiating to vacuum isn't very efficient.
And SpaceX already proven they can launch sort of datacenters 10k times by launching Starlink (up to 20KW of solar each IIRC).
FWIW Musk should support Bernie Sanders more. Putting moratoriums on datacenters would make space based ones far more economical.
It's not that you can't put a server in space, but the costs to do it almost assuredly don't make any sense. Because, if you can do it in space you can do it easier on the ground and save yourself millions in launch cost and extra complexity. Your cooling challenges are way cheaper and simpler in an atmosphere.
There's nothing much being in space really gets you, other than it makes it harder for a government to take your computers away. Not impossible, just harder.
I suppose if you are desperate to justify a large investment this what you would do - frame the story in a particular way.
Once computer constraints ease up, you will see much larger models. The reason LLM seems to have stalled a bit is because there just not enough compute.
You have more people using AI which requires more compute, and you want to build larger models which requires more compute and you have limited compute. What do you do?
" The reason LLM seems to have stalled a bit is because there just not enough compute."
lol okay mate.
If it happens it happens, if not, it doesn't.
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?!
Elon claims (which I take with a huge grain of salt because he's made endless broken promises in investor calls and interviews) that he disagrees with the administration's stance on solar and would use it to power his DCs if he could, but contends that permitting is a huge problem.
The US needs to figure out how to build again.
> This is stupid. I don't understand what's happening... specifically, what mental virus
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes"
And you don't need permits in international waters, any more than you need them in orbit. Lease space on container ships.
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
You honestly expect this trajectory to continue unabated?
Knowing humanity's history, yes. Not sure we're ever going to see a second French Revolution. People are pacified and are not rioting. And they really should. Most of us are kind of privileged. I know people out there who are barely holding on and the recent fuel + food price increases might push them over the edge to actual poverty.
All it says is expressed interest.
That's like asking a casual how are you...
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.
If you're using it 24/7 then yes, I'm sure the weekly limit is more of a concern.
If you're just using it during working hours - ie. you only use two 5-hour windows per day - then you probably, like me, struggle to hit the weekly limit even if you do max out some 5-hour windows.
Based on the size and complexity of the task, as well as any inter-task dependencies, the orchestrator deploys one or more subagents (sometimes 5 or 6 subagents) to work on these mini tasks. Once all tasks are completed, the orchestrator initiates verification and launches a review workflow. This workflow uses the original prompt, acceptance criteria, repository internal guidelines, and relevant skills to conduct a thorough review of the agents’ work.
Typically, there are one or two review iterations, during which the review agent identifies any issues. Sometimes, I may also notice issues and have to "steer" the orchestrator. The time required for a slice to complete ranges from 30 minutes to 4 or 5 hours, depending on its size, complexity, and the number of subtasks it contains.
Only if I run about 3 such orchestration in parallel I can reach hourly limit.
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.
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.
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.
20%, there are 5 work days in a week, not 7.
>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
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'd run agents consuming hundreds of millions of tokens for less than a hundred dollars.
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.
Or is that actually his main motivation. Hard to know. Either way it's a win win win for him.
I guess loosing a ton of money then trying to get some if it back makes you a genius...
But even then, I suspect their hands were tied in some areas because Elon had some expectations from his AI.
Meta engineers on the other hand, couldn't wait to jump ship. But that only reinforces the B team theory.
-Elon
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.
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.
At this point if feels like if you properly scope your work open weight LLMs are adequate.
SpaceX/xAI also has Colossus 2, with double or more the GPUs
Seems xAI will still be around
On the plus-side, it told me how much cheaper Deepseek is and that it's on parity for reverse engineering work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)#Envir...
Minor risk that taking what took 200 million years to put into the ground out in a few hundred years?
Righteo, I guess I better suspend my white privilege.
Now I have to avoid Claude too.
This is nothing like burning coal.
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?
But more than that, the emissions generated by the Colossus data centers are far worse than typical combined-cycle gas plants or data centers that buy renewable: these turbines emit NOx, fine particulates, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde into a population-dense area.
I thought people knew about this already. Post from last year: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/12/xai-data-center/
Deciding not to spend money with a company you don't like is not pointless. The point is that you're not participating in something that you judge to be wrong.
The world is full of things I feel are wrong yet have near zero power to stop. That does not mean I should willingly support those things.
Hopefully Elon lets you into his glass bubble when the s** cooks on the fan.
* 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
Certainly an interesting day for xAI.
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...
https://old.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i7w4nz/comparison_of...
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.
[0] https://wccftech.com/xai-using-just-11-percent-gpus-while-me...
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.
So, they handed out all of their data center to Anthropic; Grok wasn't using it much?
Today they say this, then tomorrow they'll silently reduce limits and argue with anyone who calls them on it.
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.
This might be a good time to drop Claude.
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.
I'm posting immediately after cancelling my claude subscriptions.
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?
In any case, it appears that Musk can't even generate enough AI demand to utilize his own ground based data center. Maybe he can add "data centers in space" to part of his Mars colonization plan. Maybe have Tesla Bots driving around in Cybertrucks too ?
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)
1. https://wccftech.com/xai-using-just-11-percent-gpus-while-me...
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.
Disgusting. For an allegedly not evil company, they’re very willing to pollute our night skies as well as partner up with a CEO who has been fanning the flames of extremism (particularly the emboldened racists / supremacists of the far right).
CEO that accelerated space industry by 10+ years
CEO that accelerated HCI industry by 10 years
so what?
Nobody is 100% evil
Musk helped dismantling USAID which leads to many people’s death.
China was doing this regardless. It was a national security issue for them.
Which is kind of like the exception that proves the rule hahaha
People haven't been saying "GabeN can do no wrong" for awhile.
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."
Also who said pollution has to be harmful? Light pollution is a thing, and this is the same class of problem.
Why dont they dip the satellites in vantablack to make them truly invisible?
> It’s a public resource that a private company is stealing from all of us
Just because the government can't accomplish what private industry is doing doesn't mean it's "stealing".
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.