Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX
Comments
nl
arian_
Anthropic renting out the data center Elon built for Grok is the kind of plot twist you can't make up.
brokencode
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.
floatrock
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?
predkambrij
Either way, now those datacenters run Claude that they didn't before.
giwook
I don't think it's the conspiracy theory that you're making it out to be.
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.
floatrock
Nvidia and Oracle are already public companies, they're just aiming for their next quarterly statements.
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.
svnt
Your argument is that since it is common in a bubble to make circular deals, there is no conspiracy. But you seem to suggest that people committing tens of billions of dollars aren’t looking any further down the pipeline than the name on the receiving bank account? Have you ever been anywhere near a large deal?
giwook
That's a lot to imply from my simple comment. My viewpoint is actually the exact opposite of what you claim: it all feels like a house of cards that is set to collapse at any moment. I can also tell you're quite passionate about this and I wonder if that emotion is clouding your interpretation of what was meant to be an innocuous comment.
My point was that there is a lot of this happening, it is not a unique statement nor is it surprising to see at this point.
I made no attempt to dismiss or justify any of it.
dlev_pika
When you put it like that sounds like another subprime crash in the making lol
Thrymr
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.
hx8
> presumably at a huge loss
Why do you say that? I was under the impression that everyone in the datacenter business was printing money.
XorNot
Oracle certainly isn't.
23rf
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.
giwook
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
bombcar
Maxim 29: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.
a4isms
This is something you say aloud, while muttering "useful idiot" under your breath.
BrianGragg
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.
philipwhiuk
But like... most companies are so short of GPUs they'd run it on anything. SpaceXAI not needing the compute is not really a good sign imo.
scottyah
Are you worried about Google too? They're selling compute. Same with Microsoft, and Amazon. As far as I know Anthropic is really the only one that's compute-bound.
fhn
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon's business model include selling compute - SpaceX, not so much.
dzhiurgis
> As far as I know Anthropic is really the only one that's compute-bound.
I use gemini models daily. Jetbrains tells me when they are overloaded and switches to alternative (usually to openai which turns everything to shit). I'd say happens about fortnightly.
It's a good litmus and forecaster for AI demand and I wish we had more visibility.
elxr
Is gemini really better than gpt 5.5 currently? I haven't seen much sentiment along that direction.
igor47
[delayed]
cedws
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.
HarHarVeryFunny
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.
nerdsniper
> 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.
kcb
Elon Musk has been failing any minute now since like what? 2015
HarHarVeryFunny
I didn't say he's failing at everything - SpaceX certainly seems a huge success. Telsa had been doing well, although sales are now declining fast, and the Cybertruck has been a failure. He massively overpaid for Twitter, ruined the site, then got X.ai to bail him out. X.ai seems like a failure - evidentially not enough demand to utilize the data center he built for it, and when have you seen anyone say they use Grok for anything ?
And now SpaceX investors are going to be left as the bag holders for X.ai/Twitter.
23rf
He's a big gambler with some judgement. But being a big gambler by definition means you will not always get it right.
scottyah
It is always so odd seeing how many internet people consider any new attempt that doesn't go immediately viral with success as a bad mark on someone's character.
HumanOstrich
Hey Grok is pretty good for meme videos and pics. For anything serious, not so much.
blueaquilae
If only those people listened to your guidance!
redox99
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".
charlieflowers
Not a merger, right, unless I missed something (admittedly skimming).
nprateem
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.
dboreham
I'm just relieved to read that it isn't in fact...in space.
georgemcbay
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.
robwwilliams
Urban/industrial and refinery complex; not at all rural. Located about 8 miles southwest of downtown Memphis (3231 Paul Lowery Rd) on a bend of the river.
aurareturn
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
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.VortexLain
>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.
aurareturn
If the Chinese government tells Anthropic they can freely sell Claude in China, Dario is suddenly going to be kissing China's ass instead of saying how we can't let China win the AGI race for democracy and western values.
BrianGragg
After they told the US government no on a very large contract. I find that hard to believe.
XorNot
They told the US government no on using Claude for approving lethal military strikes.
China can get plenty of value from Claude without needing to use it for anything similar.
They very specifically avoided a trap where the next time the US blows up a school full of children they were very obviously going to blame Claude for it.
phatfish
Which naive souls are downvoting this? Anthropic is speed running Google's "don't be evil" mantra.
2ndorderthought
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"
foobar_______
Thank you for the "real speak" section. Accurate and hilarious.
toephu2
> 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!"
driverdan
> Are you insinuating any non-democratic government is bad and evil
The ones run by people who chop up journalists certainly are.
aurareturn
No, I didn't say that.
My point is that Anthropic cares a lot about "democracy" but will buy compute from a data center mostly funded by non-democratic nations.
trollbridge
Who do you think is the sources of funding for Anthropic's lead investors?
aurareturn
Your tone suggests I'm unaware of the fact that Middle East money heavily invests in American AI companies and data centers.
lern_too_spel
Anthropic brought up the "democratic" justification, not GP. GP was just pointing out that Anthropic doesn't actually care. If it can get a sweetheart deal from an autocrat, it'll take it.
But assuming there are people that care, if a government doesn't derive its right to govern from the will of the people it governs, under what definitions can it be considered legitimate? Divine right of kings?
shimman
Yes, especially in the context of supporting US imperialism and capitalists interests (perpetual war + extraction machine) over what would actually benefit Americans: peace + cooperation initiatives. Something also tells me that American civilians would rather cooperate with peaceful governments than those that feed the blood machine.
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.
Footnote7341
IDK what world you're living in, but in the real world Americans are the richest people on earth and richer than ever before in real terms. And yes international seigniorage is part of that.
losvedir
> 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?
epistasis
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.
airspresso
> 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.
sroussey
> 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!
giwook
How many instances of Doom can it run though?
gpugreg
> 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.
airspresso
> posting this sentence was part of the deal to get the compute
This 100%
scottyah
Source? I'd like to read more on Anthropic's views of space compute
Sevii
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.
cyclopeanutopia
What are you talking about
There is no doubt that it's not a serious idea.
charlieflowers
Help me understand why not? I know solar power generation in space, and "beaming" the power back, was a naive idea. But this would actually use the power up there, mostly for training, but also for inference.
That claim seems reasonable. I have zero knowledge of the economics of launching and maintaining satellites though.
PufPufPuf
As I understand it, the problem is cooling. There isn't any medium to take away the heat, so the only option is to slowly radiate it away.
Gagarin1917
Which is apparently manageable. Scott Manley isn’t an industry veteran, but he does know a lot about space engineering and science. Here’s his breakdown of the feasibility, and heat management is not really a major issue:
Sammi
Anyone who has googled just once to ask if datacenters in space make any sense, has found out they don't because they can't get rid of heat.
That leaves only two kinds of people left who are still talking excitedly about datacenters in space: The uninformed and the grifters.
dgfl
The existence of starlink proves that this is false. Look at most current pitches, they don’t talk about GW-class monsters anymore. There’s absolutely nothing stopping a 20-30kW satellite bus the size of starlink (or I guess up to 100kW? once starship is available - it’s all about payload fairing diameter) from hosting ~1 rack of compute and antennas. The economics may or may not make sense, we’ll have to see.
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.
dmlittle
It's worth noting that GPUs have a much higher failure rate than traditional CPUs. Over 10x the failure rate due thermal stress. The amount of heat generated is very different. You can't really replace a GPU in a satellite (at least today?) which would place most of these satellites as space debris in a ~5 year horizon.
sroussey
Usually satellites utilize an older node as newer nodes are easily bit-flipped by radiation. And blocking radiation is heavy.
AI calcs may handle wrong calculations better than cpus where software will tend to panic.
lijok
Which is the same lifetime as a starlink sat
gambiting
So what exactly is the benefit of having that thing in orbit then, where it costs you millions of dollars to put it there?
Footnote7341
The current bottleneck on compute is power and zoning. Solar panels are 5x more efficient in space, and there is no zoning in space.
jsnell
The current bottleneck is silicon. Every chip that is manufactured gets housed and powered. (It makes sense: the cost of compute is dominated by capex, the power costs are irrelevant, so they're ok paying a premium for power).
The space data center hypothesis relies on compute supply growing faster than power supply. (Both are bottlenecked on parts of the supply chain that will take ages to scale.)
Even if you believe that's the case, the point at which orbital data centers start making sense is incredibly sensitive to the exact growth rates.
dzhiurgis
Self destruction is a feature, not a bug.
That said eventually they can be lifted to higher orbits and have robots deliver and swap updated compute (if not made in space itself!).
Sammi
I've heard this before. A datacenter and a starlink sattelite are not in the same ballpark of power usage and heat dissipation needs. The are orders of magnitude off from each other.
small_model
SpaceX have presented on this and it's fairly straightforward and they already do it with starlink satellites, just at a larger scale. Sound like you are the uniformed one (or an EDS victim)
ceejayoz
Starlink satellites don't generate the sort of heat a datacenter full of GPUs does. The ISS has enormous radiators, and it's only in space because it's a space station. Putting datacenters there is just goofy given the amount of available space on the ground.
lijok
Why are you comparing the output of a datacenter to the output of a single sat?
How much power do starlink sats draw and how does it compare to say 8x H200s?
ceejayoz
> This gives us access to more than 300 megawatts of new capacity (over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs) within the month.
27,500 satellites need launching - fast! - just for Claude to meet a demand spike?
Sammi
I've heard this before and these are not comparable at all. Starlink is missing a few digits in it's power usage and heat dissipation needs compared to a datacenter.
wbxp99
EDS? Like still believing Elon's claims are truthful?
redox99
The area you need in radiators is only half the area you need in solar panels. So it's definitely not a deal breaker.
Its still very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more.
scottyah
Pretty much everything has been "very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more". What kind of hacker are you to be on this site lol
prepend
Solar on earth was dumb because of logistics, right?
Things get cheaper.
lijok
what do you mean they can’t get rid of heat? radiators exist
ceejayoz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
All that gets you 70kW of cooling. Radiating to vacuum isn't very efficient.
scottyah
Dang, sucks we can never improve any technology. Let's just call it quits, guys.
cyclopeanutopia
Maybe one day we can, but it's definitely not in a category "there is no doubt".
scottyah
Of course not, where's the fun in that category?
ceejayoz
Technology is wonderful.
Physics still gets a say.
joe_mamba
Space radiators are not very efficient due to lack of airflow in space.
dzhiurgis
Scott Manley, I’d say one of the top pop space youtubers say otherwise. If anything it’s easier in space. On earth most complexity in datacenter is cooling. In space you just radiate it away.
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.
vel0city
He just mentions and walks through idea of having some amount of compute up there and what the heat rejection calculations roughly look like. He doesn't actually explore the economics of doing such a thing or discuss if it's actually worth doing.
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.
scottyah
Especially with everyone clamoring to have datacenters built in their backyards. There's absolutely no way there can be an advantage to figuring out compute outside Earth's magnetosphere, especially since none of the engineers as SpaceX would ever think of any long-term benefits of that.
dzhiurgis
I'm just responding to op saying it's impossible to get rid of heat. None of us touched economics.
mcmcmc
“YouTuber” is an extremely poor qualification for a supposedly trusted source
boredatoms
He's a physicist though, not just a mic jockey
kibibu
Let's hear what Big Money Salvia has to say about all this
23rf
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.
impulser_
Local models are always going to be useless unless compute get significantly cheaper, and it's not. TSMC might literally run out of capacity to build any consumer compute product.
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?
23rf
Right.. and computers were once the size of a large room vs now fit into a pocket.
" The reason LLM seems to have stalled a bit is because there just not enough compute."
lol okay mate.
JMKH42
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.
CamperBob2
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?!
Karrot_Kream
Because the US has levied high tariffs on solar cells, can't build their own solar cells economically enough, and has such a torrid permitting system that it can't build transmission lines. Natural gas is the only form of generation that's easy to permit outside cities (due to pipeline agreements and this admin fast-tracking natural gas generation approval) but few cities will allow one. DCs need to be built within low latency interconnect of urban areas or else they become uncompetitive.
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"
CamperBob2
What does that have to do with my point? Space-based data centers need solar cells too. They are just like terrestrial data centers, only more expensive. For every dollar you save on the PV array, you'll spend two more on radiators.
And you don't need permits in international waters, any more than you need them in orbit. Lease space on container ships.
Karrot_Kream
The argument is that it's too hard to gain the necessary approvals on Earth such that space is faster and easier. Not sure I buy it fully (I do see it somewhat), but that's the argument.
0cf8612b2e1e
The permitting slowdown is if it want to connect to the grid. If you want to run solar behind the meter, you can go nuts.
Karrot_Kream
Sure but acquiring enough land to build solar profitably near a DC that can hook up to the big US interconnects is very expensive and will often be blocked by residents. If you want to build solar where there are few people and cheap input costs, then you need to transmit the power to the DC.
zeafoamrun
The middle of downtown Seattle would be greatly improved if it were replaced by a giant data center.
joshstrange
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
re-thc
> 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...
anthonypasq
most of the big tech ceos have mentioned this.
shimman
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?
pdimitar
> 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.
bethekidyouwant
But not French revolution poverty to be fair.
Rover222
It’s weird to not take this seriously. It’s obvious it’s serious and they’re pursuing it.
scottyah
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.
sourcegrift
Anybody who spends 5 minutes on reddit outside of pornographic or cuckoldry subs knows that this is not a serious idea
0xbadcafebee
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.
boldlybold
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."
Thrymr
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...
BrianGragg
How is a private company running a natural gas generator any different than a public power utility running a natural gas generator? Besides in this case one paid the 'tax' and the other delayed in doing so?... Nothing changed to the environment good or bad from paying the government their 'tax' (permit fee)....
avianlyric
Proper utility scale gas generators come with proper utility scale pollution controls to make sure nasties like fine particulate and NO is filtered or properly reduced into some much less harmful to human health.
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
Thrymr
Public power utilities get permits for their operations. xAI tried to get around permitting regulations and environmental laws by claiming the generators were temporary, got sued [0], and even the Trump administration's EPA ruled against them [1]. They are also now trying to do it again in another state with Colossus 2 [2].
[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...
fancyfredbot
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.
breadsniffer
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)
lostmsu
Any specifics? What are they doing and what statutes are allegedly being violated?
SirSavary
Emphasis my own:
> "The xAI facility has already deployed *nearly 20 gas turbines, including four large units with a combined capacity of 100MW*, to power its AI system Grok... There are plans to add *15 more gas turbines between June 2025 and June 2030*, and the turbine application projects *annual emissions of around 11.51 tons of hazardous air pollutants*."
> "it is currently *running gas turbines without the necessary permits from the Shelby County Health Department*"
> "findings from the Southern Environmental Law Center indicate that the facility has 'installed' gas turbines. This suggests that new industrial systems are in place and that *xAI is obligated to comply with the new NSPS* [New Source Performance Standards] *to avoid violating the Clean Air Act*"
> "NSPS are authorized under *Section 211 of the Clean Air Act*... All new sources must comply with the *Best System of Emission Reduction (BSER)*, which mandates the use of state-of-the-art technology to minimize air pollutants."
> "there is a history of Elon Musk's companies, such as *SpaceX and the Boring Company, being fined thousands of dollars for violating environmental law* to circumvent regulation"
MagicMoonlight
How would a data centre poison the water? They don’t produce any chemicals or do anything.
timmmmmmay
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
ETH_start
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.
causal
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...
polski-g
I like how you said "googling this", but then didn't actually read the article you linked.
causal
> In general, data centers only pay corporate income tax if they generate revenue. Not all data centers do this because many don’t sell goods or services; they simply house servers. By qualifying as business expenses rather than revenue generators, they reduce the tax liability of their parent companies.
> 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.
osiris970
They pay property taxes. The best tax there is as of now (LVT when)
mirzap
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.
swalsh
I have never come close to my weekly limit, but have hit my hourly limit frequently.
codazoda
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.
piyh
Are you using haiku for most tasks? I'm in the Google ecosystem so I'm curious how it is on the other side.
codazoda
Nope, I use Opus 4.7, mostly. Sometimes Sonnet 4.6 if I’m trying to use less tokens.
mirzap
For me it's the opposite. I almost never hit hourly limit, but I hit weekly limit in about 5 days.
nickthegreek
Would be more meaningful if everyone said what plan they are on, as there are 3 different ones that users could be discussing.
replygirl
last week with claude i saturated a team premium seat at day 6 of its cycle, and a max 20x seat at day 4, plus ~$150 extra usage spend, with a 60hr work week where i am not even primarily an IC, as well as a codex 20x plan at day 3 with a personal project
jizzywizzy
Along with how many 5-hour windows they use in a day.
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.
mirzap
I'm on $200 Max plan
extr
What does your usage look like day to day? Are you using a low level amount all day long? I'm with the others here, I've never hit the weekly limit ever, only the hourly, and I consider myself a heavy user.
mirzap
I dedicate a significant amount of time to defining the precise actions that agents should perform (PRD/ADR). I break down the feature sets into Milestones and slices (tasks). These tasks are small, well-defined, and scoped. I have a prompt template that the “architect” agent prepares whenever I want to initiate a new feature. This ensures that the prompt structure remains consistent and standardized over time. The generated prompt is then pasted to the “orchestrator,” which performs context discovery (using Repoprompt) and finalizes the plan then proceeds to launch subagents to do the work.
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.
calgoo
I have found that it uses a lot more tokens if I give it a very detailed todo and loop over every task 1 by 1. I now keep it to phases with detailed tasks underneath and use /loop over the phases and it uses a lot less. I also manage the context windows and tend to clear it often to keep it under around 200k (or less depending on project size)
mirzap
Yeah, I do that too. Essentially, the system I described begins working on a task that is small enough and clearly defined. Each “slice” in a milestone usually have 5-10 subtasks (for instance, Slice E1 has P1...P6 subtasks). The orchestrator then receives the prompt to implement E1-P1.
jLaForest
It sounds like you are describing oh my open agent
culopatin
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
vidarh
I hit my weekly limit in 3 days this week. Irregularly do in 5. With the top MAX sub.
scottyah
Wow, then you are most likely doing something very wrong.
headcanon
same, I struggle to use more than half of my weekly, even if I max out my 5-hour windows regularly during the day.
druskacik
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.
Salgat
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.
dwaltrip
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.
airstrike
I've maxed out weekly limits for 2 $200 accounts before
9wzYQbTYsAIc
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.
solenoid0937
5 hours were the painful ones. If you're hitting your weekly you've outgrown the sub and should use extra billing
sidrag22
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.
alwillis
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-...
solenoid0937
> 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.
sidrag22
weird distinction to make when replying to someone talking about their own personal usage of the weekly limit that is a 7 day window of time.
varispeed
Who cares about rate limits if they serve your prompt using dumbed down model.
htrp
>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
peder
> 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.
swalsh
There's always money in the giggawatt datacenter
petercooper
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?
swalsh
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.
Geee
Unlikely, because xAI had huge amount of overcapacity.
vagab0nd
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.
kingstnap
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.
swalsh
Billions in revenue just before your IPO isn't a bad deal either.
fancyfredbot
The icing on the cake for Elon is that it strengthens the competition to OpenAI.
Or is that actually his main motivation. Hard to know. Either way it's a win win win for him.
throwa356262
That's certainly one way one could spin this.
I guess loosing a ton of money then trying to get some if it back makes you a genius...
scottyah
Yeah real geniuses go down with the ship and never change what they set out to do
JustSkyfall
Probably a good idea in all honesty. xAI is a deeply unserious lab
throwa356262
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.
fancyfredbot
Did Google outbid Elon for team A? Or A team just don't like Elon?
throwa356262
It's an internal jokes since very few high profile Deepmind engineers accepted his offer despite some serious cash being thrown at them.
Meta engineers on the other hand, couldn't wait to jump ship. But that only reinforces the B team theory.
lostmsu
LLaMA was pretty good at the time
cyanydeez
There's only so much determinism you can create when you try not to filter (read CENSOR) your LLM.
AlexCoventry
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.
spikels
No I don't ever give up. I would have to be dead or completely incapacitated.
-Elon
croes
Or he just got leverage on a competitor
gck1
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.
farfatched
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.
sergiotapia
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.
minimaxir
> 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.
scottyah
The datacenter isn't operational yet, they don't magically get more processing instantly after signing a deal.
dw_arthur
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.
farfatched
Ouch, I wasn't aware they were discounting so much. There goes my subscription escape plan.
cbg0
They're doubling the five hour limits, but no mention about the weekly limit. So overall it's the same maximum usage, right?
farfatched
If this logic applied, then there would be no purpose in them having the 5 hourly limit.
adriand
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.
novaleaf
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)
solenoid0937
Like 90% of people I know never hit their weekly but they hit their hourly. I'd bet your case is way rarer.
joncik91
Some get the reset, some don't it seems :(
dagi3d
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?
antipaul
"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
ilia-a
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
Philpax
Well, this sucks :/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)#Envir...
thrownthatway
Why?
chainwax
I think he's referring to the fact that Colossus is powered by fossil fuels.
kfrzcode
literally the entire economy is powered by fossil fuels
HarHarVeryFunny
As far as electricity goes, the US is currently 50/50 fossil fuels and renewables (solar, wind, etc).
thrownthatway
No do the entire economy.
quinncom
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.
everfrustrated
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.
jLaForest
While the burning of methane is cleaner, the extraction of methane is a massive source of uncontrolled pollution emissions which is made worse by the fact that methane is 20x worse for greenhouse effect than CO2. Clean methane is another green washing myth to encourage people to keep consuming at much as possible
scottyah
A lot of it is just captured during oil extraction, whereas before it just wasn't captured.
stuaxo
This natural gas burning is suited too close to where people live.
everfrustrated
You do understand natural gas burns very clean? People burn it in their houses to cook with it!
throwaway473825
People burn coal to heat their houses. That doesn't mean it's healthy. Gas stoves are known to cause asthma.
bottlepalm
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?
Footnote7341
I'm using grok to help bring awareness to black and brown and latinx communities that live within 100 miles of Colossus 1!
quinncom
Obviously I’m virtue signaling, and I hope instilling a feeling of shame in people who support businesses that contribute to climate change.
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/
data-ottawa
Sorry, what?
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.
formvoltron
gas turbines generally are for peaking. Not for base load.
Hopefully Elon lets you into his glass bubble when the s** cooks on the fan.
boramalper
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.
bpodgursky
Building datacenters plays to his strengths. It's a good partnership if he can stomach it.
23rf
As long as it keeps Altman awake at night, it's all good I believe for Elon.
consumer451
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...
w4yai
If it is a Nazi salute, it's a real bad one !
consumer451
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
https://old.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i7w4nz/comparison_of...
1234letshaveatw
meh, he's no Graham Platner
skeledrew
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.
flumpcakes
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?
exabrial
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
kcb
There's no magic bullet for inference on cheap accelerators. Any accelerator will still require large amounts of high bandwidth memory.
int32_64
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?
tanh
Wouldn't trust them not to take a copy and use it to distill. Wonder what security there is
exabrial
> 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.
Geee
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...
redox99
11% is the MFU. Not how many GPUs are running. Big misunderstanding.
everfrustrated
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.
aurareturn
Source on this?
everfrustrated
Following various X posts, asking Grok to check my memory. https://grokipedia.com/page/Colossus_supercomputer backs this up.
solarkraft
Elon Musk is not a reliable source.
athrow
Anthropic taketh and Anthropic giveth.
HarHarVeryFunny
Exactly.
Today they say this, then tomorrow they'll silently reduce limits and argue with anyone who calls them on it.
solenoid0937
This is obviously because of the new compute deal. I don't see them going back unless prosumer demand outgrows compute again.
logicalappeals
Anthropic looking to garner some good will after the recent issues. I’ll gladly take the higher rate limits
tintor
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.
y42
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.
mandeepj
"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?
jizzywizzy
Moved to Colossus 2. Though I guess you could still frame it as 'don't they need Collosus 1 AND 2' if you want...
amacbride
As a bonus, it looks like they reset limits a few minutes ago -- I went from 53% of my weekly allotment to 0%.
readitalready
Not for me. 2 Claude Max 20x accounts here both at high usage on weekly allotments.
maelito
These energy figures are gigantic. It's getting absurd.
kristianp
What GPUs does Colossus run? Old H100s?
swalsh
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.
driverdan
> Elon actually figures out
Elon doesn't figure out anything. He pays people to do it and then tries to take the credit.
mplewis
The first is impossible and the second isn't happening and won't happen.
croes
I wouldn’t say impossible but not effective
nextstep
the leader of building earth-based datacenters lol
what are we even talking about
nethunters
Hopefully this filters through to Copilot's recent rate-limits
stuaxo
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.
2001zhaozhao
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.
gigatexal
I would gladly take a worse experience than to have my favored LLM vendor partner with an Elon company.
lairv
For a space that supposedly had "no moat", the number of players still competing for frontier models seems to be shrinking pretty fast
swader999
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.
LNSY
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.
Marciplan
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
iamleppert
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.
hirvi74
I would have preferred an increase in the weekly limits instead of the 5-hour limits.
Rover222
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.
HarHarVeryFunny
> 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?
everfrustrated
Orbital DCs is blocked on starship because they _arent_ doing starlink sized satellites.
HarHarVeryFunny
You're not going to fit a data center in a Starship either, unless you are talking a Tiny Corp Exabox "data center in a shipping container" sized one. Even something that small (1MW) would still need 4x the solar capacity of the ISS, and therefore likely some assembly required. Then you've got latency from satellite to satellite ...
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 ?
Rover222
Okay well you’re clearly not understanding the basic concept of the orbital architecture.
namnnumbr
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)
hellohello2
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?
Geee
See the recent Dwarkesh interview with Elon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA
Rover222
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.
lossolo
xAI (part of SpaceX) using just 11 percent of GPUs[1]
1. https://wccftech.com/xai-using-just-11-percent-gpus-while-me...
sourcegrift
Anthropic aligning with the guy who got Trump elected means they are dead to me.
I'm posting immediately after cancelling my claude subscriptions.
4b11b4
I mean... seems like a no-brainer
stavros
> 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.
solenoid0937
People are so cynical on HN. Just move to API billing if not getting enough subsidized compute is that big a deal for you?
stavros
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"?
AlexCoventry
So now Elon Musk gets to read all of our Claude conversations?? :-(
hparadiz
Give them whatever they need. Time to go to the moon.
mark_l_watson
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.
breakingcups
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.
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.