Anthropic says in a US document that gas supply limits its growth

On Monday, Anthropic sent a document to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. It says that some planned data centers use electricity from gas turbines on site. It says that fuel costs, a shortage of turbines and new rules could increase its costs. Last year it announced a $50 billion plan for data centers in Texas and New York.

What the document says

Anthropic leases computer capacity from large cloud companies. It says that the competition for electricity and sites is intense. It says that these companies will compete for gas and pipeline capacity. It says that this “could drive up the price of natural gas”.

The numbers

Gas gives 40 percent of US electricity. A shortage of gas turbines slows construction. Developers use simpler turbines that are less efficient and pollute more. A study from Texas found that data center demand could erase decades of air quality gains in five years. The document gives no cost figure for these risks.

What is not known

The document does not say how much of the capacity of Anthropic uses gas. Regulators could add conditions or standby charges if other utility customers pay more. Anthropic also says that more heat will increase its cost for electricity and water.

Insight: Electricity, not chips, is the gate to scale

Anthropic lists gas and grid access as a risk to growth. Its Frontier Red Team operated a model with 26 billion parameters on 15 TV boxes at 0.39 tokens each second. Cheap hardware can operate a model, but only slowly, and scale seems to follow control of electricity. Owners of turbines and grid links get power. Leaders must think that AI capacity prices follow energy prices.