Anthropic’s SpaceX compute deal comes as AI data center backlash grows—fueled by both real grievances and conspiracy theories

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.

AI executives often talk about future models as if they will become utilities—something like electricity or water flowing from a tap, instantly available whenever people need more intelligence. But none of that works unless the companies building those systems can first access the real faucet underneath it all: electricity powering vast clusters of AI chips.

That helps explain why Anthropic, a company known for emphasizing AI safety, is now turning to Elon Musk—who had previously called Anthropic a company that “hates Western civilization”—to quench its growing thirst for computing power.

Data center backlash is growing

It also leads to the second thread in this story: As Big Tech feeds its growing hunger for computing power by building ever-larger AI data centers—often in rural areas rich in land and high-voltage transmission access—backlash against these behemoths has started spilling into the broader public consciousness.

That became clear yesterday after I published the third story in my series on communities affected by the AI data center boom. In March, I traveled to Saline Township, Michigan, an agricultural community outside Ann Arbor, where........

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