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May 07, 2026
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Supported by
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Happy Thursday! Anthropic will use all of the compute capacity at xAI's Colossus 1 data center. Elon Musk once offered Sam Altman a Tesla board seat, according to court testimony. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says an 80-fold jump in revenue and AI usage in the first quarter took his company by surprise.
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Anthropic has struck a deal to use all of the compute capacity from xAI’s first data center in Memphis within the coming month, the company said on Wednesday. The data center, known as Colossus 1, has 300 megawatts of capacity and more than 220,000 Nvidia chips. xAI also said the companies had struck a deal involving Colossus 1, but did not confirm how much capacity Anthropic is buying. Neither company disclosed financial details of the deal, though both also said Anthropic had “expressed interest” in partnering with SpaceX on data centers in space in the future. In a post on X, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he’d agreed to the deal after spending time with the Anthropic team last week and that xAI would continue to train its models at its second data center in Memphis. The news comes after xAI also disclosed a deal to sell compute from its data centers to Cursor. SpaceX has two data centers in Memphis and has purchased a site for a third data center nearby. xAI has had performance issues, including outages that have interrupted training of its AI models at its second data center known as Macrohard. The company has also faced intense pushback from neighbors concerned about xAI’s use of natural gas turbines to power its facilities.
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Elon Musk once offered Sam Altman a seat on Tesla’s board of directors as part of discussions about OpenAI possibly joining Musk’s electric vehicle company, a Musk ally testified on Wednesday. Shivon Zilis, who has worked for several of Musk’s ventures and has four children with the tech tycoon, described the episode under cross examination in the trial over Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI. OpenAI lawyers have been trying to show that Musk was long open to the idea of OpenAI becoming part of a for-profit company. OpenAI lawyer Sarah Eddy asked Zilis about discussions among OpenAI’s co-founders, including Musk and Altman, during its early years about its fundraising needs and structure. One option that Musk encouraged was that it become part of Tesla, which Musk thought could start an AI research division to
compete with Google DeepMind. Asked if she recalled that Musk offered Sam a Tesla board seat, Zilis said yes, though she didn’t recall when. Eddy also read from an email Zilis wrote at the time saying that Altman seemed more open to joining Tesla than other OpenAI co-founders, and she thought Musk could convince him.
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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Wednesday that an 80-fold jump in revenue and customers’ AI use in the first quarter took the company by surprise. “We tried to plan very well for a world of 10x growth per year,” he said on stage during the company’s Code With Claude developer conference in San Francisco. “That is the reason we have had difficulties with compute.” It’s not clear what figures he was referring to. Anthropic’s annualized revenue rose from just under $1 billion at the end of 2024 to $9 billion at year-end, and then tripled by early April to $30 billion. Strong demand for its Claude Code and work agents means it had nearly beat its projections for the year last month, The Information previously reported. The demand has strained its ability to run its AI models for its customers, which it’s tried to relieve with a slew of new cloud contracts. Over the last month it announced deals with Amazon and Google to supply a combined 10 gigawatts of compute. Then on Thursday it said it had struck a deal to use all of the compute capacity from xAI’s first data center, known as Colossus 1, in Memphis within the coming month. “We’re working as quickly as possible to provide more compute than we have had in the past,” he told attendees. He said the company “would continue to acquire as much” compute as possible.
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Uber reported steady growth in the first quarter, with gross bookings—the dollar value of all transactions on the service—rising 25%, although only 21% on a constant currency basis. Uber’s free cash flow was essentially flat at $2.286 billion. An accounting change in the UK, relating to how revenue is classified, meant that Uber’s revenue from its mobility service barely grew on a constant currency basis. Revenue overall grew 10% on that basis, driven by a 28% lift in delivery revenue. Uber CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy said Uber had “re-upped our investment” in AI after underestimating the impact of AI tools. Uber’s Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information in mid April that the company had maxed out its AI budget for 2026 already. Krishnamurthy acnowledged that “when we set our budgets for 2026 in November, we underestimated the amount of impact” AI would have. He said increases in the budget were being offset against slower growth in hiring.
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Snap’s revenue growth accelerated to 12% in the first quarter, lifted by strong growth in the social media firm’s small subscriptions business. Advertising, which contributes the bulk of Snap’s revenue, grew just 3%, a slower rate than the previous quarter. The anemic growth in advertising suggests Snap has not overcome its main hurdles, relating to the limited appeal of its mostly young audience to advertisers. But subscription revenues is an increasingly important part of Snap’s business, accounting for 19% of the total in the first quarter. In a letter to shareholders, Snap said it was seeing some signs of improvement in its ad business, particularly among small to medium sized businesses, but noted that large advertisers in North America “remained a headwind.” Snap projected 14% revenue growth in the
second quarter.
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