Under-reported details of the xAI/Anthropic Colossus data center deal: Anthropic get Colossus 1 but xAI keep using the larger Colossus 2, Colossus 1 has a REALLY bad environmental record, and xAI just shut down a bunch of older models on 2 weeks' notice https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/7/xai-anthropic/
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@simon Also it’s 300MW. People often don’t look at units. They recently made deals totally 11GW with Amazon, Google and Microsoft. IMO this is only news worthy because it has some relation to Elon Musk. Like the OpenAI lawsuit it’s all part of the run-up for the SpaceX/xAI IPO. An IPO that could allow SpaceX to buy Tesla and trigger his payout clause. He has being the first trillionaire as incentive to get this right. He is a master at this (or employs those who are).
the 2-week deprecation notice for 8 endpoints is the real story here. any team using grok-3 or grok-code in prod right now has to scramble. this is exactly why I keep a provider-agnostic abstraction layer — vendor lock-in cost shows up exactly at moments like this.
Oh, and Elon said "We reserve the right to reclaim the compute if their AI engages in actions that harm humanity."
