Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition: U.S. and China pursue AI guardrails to handle race to build powerful AI systems…How a congressional primary became a proxy battle over AI…The reggae band in a nightmare battle against AI slop remixes.
I’ve spent a good deal of my time at Fortune focused on the mega AI data center boom—the new era of sprawling, gigawatt-scale AI campuses humming with racks of chips powering frontier models. That shift came sharply into focus with projects like Elon Musk’s Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, which broke ground in 2024.
This week, three strands of this sprawling and deeply physical AI infrastructure story converged for me in a way I hadn’t seen before.
Anthropic’s growing compute hunger
First, there was Anthropic’s deal with Elon Musk’s newly renamed AI company, SpaceXAI — formerly xAI before its acquisition by SpaceX—to secure more computing power from, you guessed it, the Colossus supercomputer in Memphis. The massive facility reportedly houses more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. Anthropic said the added compute would help expand capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers who have been complaining about usage limits and availability.
