How Anthropic and Elon Musk cornered Sam Altman this week

Anthropic secured access to Elon Musk's Colossus 1 facility in Memphis — over 300 megawatts and 220,000+ NVIDIA GPUs — making it the marquee customer for xAI's compute infrastructure. This deal comes amid the ongoing Musk v. Altman federal trial over OpenAI's for-profit conversion. The compute acquisition is directly tied to Anthropic's new agentic features: 'dreaming' (background memory consolidation), outcomes-based evaluation, and multi-agent orchestration — all of which multiply compute consumption significantly. Anthropic's annualized revenue reportedly grew from $9B to $30B+ in months, described as the fastest revenue ramp in US business history. The piece argues compute capacity — not model quality — is now the primary competitive moat in frontier AI, with SpaceX positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for multiple AI companies including Cursor.