Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal
7th May 2026
There weren’t a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday’s Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they’ve struck with SpaceX/xAI to use “all of the capacity of their Colossus data center”.
As I mentioned in my live blog of the keynote, that’s the one with the particularly bad environmental record. The gas t...
The narrative frames the transfer of high-capacity compute as a transactional exchange, juxtaposing technological progress with regulatory and environmental costs. The underlying pattern relies on positioning the AI infrastructure as a zero-sum resource subject to external, often selectively applied, ethical criteria. This creates a systemic risk by subordinating environmental accountability and data center location to the operational needs of the AI ecosystem. The conflict between the stated go...
