Anthropic's AI Capacity Breakthrough
5 Notable Data Center Links for May 9, 2026
Each week I curate 5 links from the data center sector that I find particularly interesting, with my commentary on why they merit your attention.
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5 Notable Data Center Links
Anthropic Makes Compute Deal With SpaceX (Anthropic) - AI lab Anthropic made a huge deal for AI capacity, which brought immediate relief for customers of the company’s Claude services. Anthropic announced a partnership with SpaceXAI to use all the compute capacity at its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, which was built by xAI. The deal provides Anthropic with access to 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs and more than 300 megawatts of power. That was good news for Claude users, who have been complaining for weeks about usage limits on the capacity-strapped service. “This additional capacity will directly improve capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers,” Anthropic said. SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk said Colossus 1 was available because SpaceXAI had already moved its training to the nearby Colossus 2 facility. The companies also said that Anthropic has “expressed interest in partnering with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”
Grid Watchdog Issues Level 3 Alert for PJM, Mandates Action to Address Data Center Load (Utility Dive) - The reliability situation in the PJM Interconnection is beginning to alarm industry watchers, and data center demand is a major component of the demand surge on the regional grid. The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) this week issued a rare Level 3 alert (the watchdog’s highest level) amid concerns about data centers unexpectedly dropping load or oscillating demand rapidly, creating reliability concerns. “The grid faces unprecedented challenges from a surge in large power consumers,” NERC said in a statement. This could easily become a headache for the 65 million Americans served by PJM across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest states. The first good heat wave in the region will likely be accompanied by headlines about this alert, which follows a Level 2 warning last year.
Power Buffer Protects Grid From Data Centers’ Wild Load Swings (IEEE Spectrum) - Meanwhile, there are multiple solutions to data center power oscillation problems. IEEE Spectrum profiles an ON.energy grid buffer system, which recently “sailed through a battery of tests at the U.S. National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR). In the tests, ON.energy’s system sat between a simulated data center and a simulated grid. The system successfully protected the data center from grid instability and also safeguarded the grid from the major load swings generated by the data center. The company’s technology involves a bidirectional uninterruptible power supply (UPS) that it calls AI UPS. I’m playing catchup a bit on this item, which appeared at the end of April but speaks directly to the challenges in this week’s NERC alert.
NVIDIA and Corning Announce AI Fiber Manufacturing Partnership - NVIDIA and Corning Incorporated this week announced a partnership to dramatically expand U.S.-based manufacturing of the advanced optical connectivity solutions needed to power next-generation AI infrastructure. Corning will increase its U.S.-based optical connectivity manufacturing capacity by 10x and expand its U.S. fiber production capacity by more than 50% to meet the accelerating demand driven by AI factory buildouts. The expansion includes the construction of three new advanced manufacturing facilities in North Carolina and Texas and the creation of more than 3,000 new, high-paying American jobs. ”This partnership is proof that AI is not just a technology story,” said Wendell P. Weeks, chairman, CEO and president of Corning. “It is a manufacturing story, and it is happening here in the United States.”
US Data Center Moratorium Tracker - This week’s data resource comes from Interconnected Capital, which is tracking the spread of data center moratoriums and created a dashboard. The news isn’t great, according to investor Kevin Xu, who shares his insights on Substack and says data centers have become a “bipartisan punching bag” in the pushback on AI and the data center building boom. Right now there are 50 different initiatives to limit data center development, spread across 31 states. Many are at the county level, but there are statewide measures as well.
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