Why Anthropic’s ultra-dirty deal shouldn’t surprise you at all
This is a quasi-epilogue to my recent essay linking infrasound fears from wind power to the same around data centres. I found through my career in the wind industry that weird wind farm health beliefs were mostly a marker of development done wrong. Irate communities were exploited by bad-faith disinformation groups. Data centres see something similar, but the scale is different. Impatience, bloat and corruption are resulting in growth that is frequently harmful.
What we know is that most apples are bad apples. The fundamental drivers of this change are panic and impatience, and that is what is behind the worst impacts of data centre growth, including a material risk to decarbonisation and climate action.
Anthropic are a frustrating company because they’re pretty clearly bad actors who nevertheless seem to draw a huge amount of support from well-intentioned progressives, centrists, lefties and generally the broad world of professional knowledge workers.
Their chatbot, Claude, is seen as the sensible ‘serious’ option, as competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini fall behind.
A few months back, the #QuitGPT campaign kicked off. It piggybacked off public outrage around OpenAI’s seeming willingness to work with the US government Department of War, and Anthropic’s seeming hesitancy. That distinction was wildly exaggerated, with Anthropic more than happy to supply its services for acts of extreme violence, as long as that violence was directed at foreigners and not Americans. That did not stop the QuitGPT campaign from frequently and openly urging people not just to quit GPT, but to join Claude, and specifically urge people to take up paid subscriptions.
This was specifically led by historian Rutger Bregman, if not a part of the ‘effective altruist’ movement at least a fan of it. At a few points it got really, really egregious.
The heroes at Anthropic have been struggling to provide enough computational power to meet the demands of an ultra-inefficient text generation program, resulting in usage restrictions even for users on the top paid tiers (probably at least partly driven by this surge in users).
So, in their heroic fashion, they decided to do a deal with one of the most well known ultra-polluting fossil-fuelled data centres in the US:
This is, amusingly, the first time Anthropic has ever disclosed anything even close to meaningful information about how much energy their service consumes, and which data centres that service is performed at.
It’s important information. If you are one of the many paid Claude subscribers who signed up at Rutger Bregman and QuitGPT’s behest, you can can be confident that the dark-background green-font vibe-coded website no one besides you is going to use is being written in a facility that is globally notorious for choking a black community in Memphis.
It is not just air pollution. The entire fleet of existing and planned “Colossus” data centres will emit so much greenhouse gas pollution that, by my reckoning, they’ll likely undo the entire emissions saved by Tesla’s global fleet of electric vehicles. That estimate is already out of date, by the way: a few days ago, it was revealed that xAI has added a whopping 500 megawatts of additional fossil gas turbines to Colossus 2 project, which will increase Colossus 2’s total climate footprint by 65% (from 3.1 to about 5.1 MTCO2-e). These, like most of the others at Colossus 2, are unpermitted, meaning they’re being operated illegally. It’s this second stage that’ll host xAI’s Grok chatbot, meaning this is where all the non-consensual abusive imagery X users love so deeply will be fabricated.
It is amusing to me to note that every Substack blogger putting together posts about how the water issues are “fake” assisted by Claude output will now be specifically doing so using a data centre that faked a promise for a water recycling plant:
It was already clear a while ago that Anthropic mostly do not care about climate, environment or air pollution in any material way, even if they care a little bit more about bad PR than Elon Musk does.
In a July 2025 whitepaper, Anthropic explicitly urged the US government to set a target for a minimum amount of new fossil gas generation, to power their energy hunger. These “Notional targets for natural gas projects” would, clearly, result in significantly worse pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The same paper gently urges more solar and nuclear growth too, but in no way is this a company opposed to burning through huge quantities of methane to get the job done.
Anthropic also disclose no formal information about the energy consumption and emissions footprint (unlike Google, Microsoft, Meta and others). When asked by journalists for information, they pointed to a blogpost that uses misleading framing to minimise the climate footprint of tech companies.
Anthropic do not care. They never cared. And it’s pretty absurd that they managed to win the exact opposite perception in a PR battle, in advance of a looming IPO.
Colossus is the norm, not the exception
In poking around to see what reactions emerged to this deal, particularly among the centre-left fanbase for Anthropic, I discovered this relatively widespread idea that xAI and Colossus are some sort of ugly aberration that isn’t representative of the norm.
According to the latest database update from an environmental analyst based on Bluesky, there are 184 planned or operational data centre projects with a greenhouse gas emissions footprint larger than xAI’s Colossus facility. Just….keep scrolling:
Yes: there are many more data centres with a less-bad environmental footprint. But Colossus 1 is far from the worst. There are more than 800 data centre projects with a worse PM2.5 air pollution footprint, for instance. More than 600 have a higher health cost. Most of the harm is really skewed towards these massive, high-polluting data centre megaprojects. There are 1,358 projects on the list. The top 50% of emissions are concentrated in the first 58 projects on that list.
That is to say: there is nothing fundamentally inherent to the concept of a building full of computers that causes choking air pollution, water impacts and climate change. The industry is simply shifting into a mode of corrosive and ugly development, by choice. Consider the Stratos project in Box Elder, championed by reality TV star Kevin O’Leary. This nine gigawatt site is going to run entirely on fossil gas (number two on the list above), and is pissing off pretty much every single person that lives nearby. Why does this project even exist? It really shouldn’t exist. And it makes xAI’s data centres look like community gardens.
A magic sprinkling of solar for the gas plant
As Ember director Paweł Czyżak highlighted over on LinkedIn, there is a small solar plant popping up right next door to the Colossus 1 data centre, perfectly timed with Anthropic’s deal. It is 30 megawatts.
That’ll produce about 0.05 terawatt hours in one year. Compared to an approximate 2.9 TWh of consumption from Colossus 1, that is a 1.8% reduction in the volume of gas burned. Once the other data centre stages are up and running, it’ll be about 0.3% of total.
Paweł Czyżak is gently optimistic this solar plant might expand and meet much more of the site’s demand (and later posted an update modelling a grid connection paired with a small amount of solar). If the site had been built with a grid connection and a large co-located solar array, it would have had lower air pollution and climate impacts – but not by a massive margin, considering Tennessee’s grid emissions intensity.
What if the whole thing was powered off-grid by solar? The data centre database I referenced earlier includes some rough estimates of required solar power build-out to fully fuel each facility. For this one, it’d have to grow from the 88 acres of solar built right now to between 7,649 and 10,199 acres of solar. Between 88 to 116 times the size of the existing solar site.
Crudely drawn:
This is, I hope you can tell, not an argument against solar power, nor in favour of the site’s hideously compact ultra-polluting methane turbines. It is an argument against the size of the data centre itself, and the broader shift towards these megaprojects that are designed to cause harm in one way or another. At this size, even ‘clean’ projects come with some material cost, though of course it would be far less were it fuelled by solar or wind.
It is worth noting, as Pawel does, that Colossus 1 has a whopping total installed battery capacity of 655.2 megawatt hours: “nearly double what Spain had end of last year”. It is a higher battery capacity than each of 34 American states. It is a higher battery capacity than 56 of Australia’s 66 battery installations. This huge installation of battery capacity acts to rapidly store and dispatch energy for two reasons. First, is the huge swings in power demand that occur at data centres dedicated to generative AI tasks (both for training and inference), and the second is the fact that the sluggish, puttering and outdated fossil fuel power station Musk is using cannot respond fast enough to these swings in demand.
It is an amazing case study of how data centres aren’t just directly spurring new pollution: they are also eating up the physical resources of the energy transition, and redirecting them towards worsening that pollution even further.
Is the average Anthropic user okay with this? Are they going to be assuaged by a teeny-tiny solar bandaid that reduces the site’s harm by a few measly percent?
There is no good option here. The whole industry, the major tech companies and the many, many data centre developers are all heavily invested in wildly oversized projects that will have a very material and significant impact on local air pollution and climate change if they go ahead.
As I wrote in my previous piece, what this means is that a project like Colossus isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. Anthropic isn’t the ‘good one’, it just pays slightly more attention to PR and marketing tricks. And the industry as a whole only becomes cured if this problem if it drops its obsession with supersized, ultra-polluting projects.
Thanks again for this analysis. We are an invidious position with this new tech, build or be left behind. Yet another reason for governments to regulate, and again, that means we need to vote for a government who WILL. Go the Greens.