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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."
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.

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...

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
> 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.
Are you going to stop using Claude Code then?
Get out of your bubble, my god.
Anthropic renting out the data center Elon built for Grok is the kind of plot twist you can't make up.
> 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.

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.
>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

> 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?

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.

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.
> 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.

They're doubling the five hour limits, but no mention about the weekly limit. So overall it's the same maximum usage, right?
"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

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.
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.

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?
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

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.
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.

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.

"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?

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...

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%.
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.

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.