"Of course Anthropic needed access to xAI's enormous gas-turbine-powered Colossus data center, given the rapid growth of token-hungry tools like Claude Code. Obviously the relatively uncompetitive and unpopular offerings from xAI made turning the company into a neo-cloud provider a smart choice for Elon Musk, whose main advantage in the AI race is his ability to attract capital and apply it to the increasingly physical problems of scaling - acquiring hardware, building data centers, getting them switched on - but who had nowhere to direct all those Nvidia GPUs and needed a new AI story for SpaceXAI, pre-IPO."
"Dario Amodei, the theory-minded essayist and Anthropic CEO with comparatively less experience in ignoring local regulations to quickly build enormous facilities, needed to stop his product from breaking down on a weekly basis as it onboards new corporate customers. It just makes sense. This is all true, but again, an Anthropic-xAI collab wasn't the sort of thing people were talking about two weeks ago and for plenty of good reasons."
"While Anthropic will be using xAI's first major data-center project (Colossus) to meet its inference needs - that is, to serve its models, not to train them - xAI will still be using the much larger Colossus 2 for its own purposes. Anthropic, as compute-constrained as it may be, wasn't without options but surprisingly chose a deal with a company whose CEO Amodei has specifically identified as someone with whom he has deep ideological differences regarding both AI development and politics in general."
"Anthropic is also seeking access to the data-center project most identified with pollution and disregard for the surrounding community at a moment of mounting backla"
Anthropic and xAI announced a deal that quickly became seen as inevitable. Anthropic needed access to xAI’s large Colossus data center to support rapidly growing token-hungry tools and to prevent its product from failing as it onboarded corporate customers. xAI’s move toward becoming a neo-cloud provider fit Elon Musk’s advantage in attracting capital and scaling physical infrastructure, including acquiring and operating large numbers of GPUs. Anthropic planned to use Colossus for inference rather than training, while xAI would use the larger Colossus 2 for its own work. The choice also raised concerns because xAI’s CEO had stated ideological differences with Anthropic’s CEO and because the Colossus project was associated with pollution and community backlash.
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