Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

Post by ayende » Thu, May 21, 2026, 11:19 AM UTC

petesergeant wrote: post #174

tristanj wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very doubtful given recent news that Colossus is running at 11% capacity and has hundreds of thousands of idle GPUs. xAI acquired too many GPUs and currently doesn't have enough customers to use them. That's why they are making compute deals with Anthropic and Cursor. xAI is bleeding money and this compute deal with Anthropic will pay for all of xAI's capex ($25 billion) in 2 years.

> will pay for all of xAI's capex ($25 billion) in 2 years This is a confusing framing; you pay down capex with profit not revenue, and there is presumably a high opex cost.

Post by flir » Thu, May 21, 2026, 11:24 AM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #173

tadfisher wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that was in the original script, and rewritten after some exec didn't understand how brains could be computers.

If it was indeed the original script, the reason they changed to batteries is maybe not because "some exec" is an idiot, but because it worked better from a storytelling perspective. Even if treating people as batteries doesn't make much sense as we are pretty terrible power plants, the message is clear and impactful. It is common for movies to oversimplify things, because they want to avoid having the viewer from be…

Post by reliabilityguy » Thu, May 21, 2026, 11:30 AM UTC

shenberg wrote: post #165

tristanj wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very doubtful given recent news that Colossus is running at 11% capacity and has hundreds of thousands of idle GPUs. xAI acquired too many GPUs and currently doesn't have enough customers to use them. That's why they are making compute deals with Anthropic and Cursor. xAI is bleeding money and this compute deal with Anthropic will pay for all of xAI's capex ($25 billion) in 2 years.

11% MFU does not mean 89% of GPUs are idle, it means that they're using the GPUs ineffectively.

Post by vessenes » Thu, May 21, 2026, 11:32 AM UTC

SilverElfin wrote: post #114

alienreborn wrote: post #13

Why is xAI giving up their advantage? Is this a signal that their frontier model improvements are plateauing and decided there is no value in hoarding all their compute?

Elon got rid of most of the core xAI researchers recently. It looked like firings and he said something like Grok needs to be rewritten because it was fundamentally built in a bad way. My guess - Grok was not one of the top two models and had no traction beyond users on Twitter - so investing in it did not make sense. Or maybe he needs time to build a new team and rebuild Grok, and while he’s doing that, he needs rev…

Post by vessenes » Thu, May 21, 2026, 11:33 AM UTC

bwfan123 wrote: post #78

guluarte wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they overestimated the demand for Grok, which is mostly useless, and now they have too much compute on hand.

I see this as a huge warning sign. If a frontier ai lab is in this position of renting their own capacity, imagine how much overcapacity there is in the system. Outside of VC money, and circular financing, the only external money coming into ai are into open-ai, and anthropic via their subscriptions and APIs.