65, 100, 400

A bipartisan backlash against data centers is emerging in the U.S., with Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Tiffany attacking Democratic rival David Crowley in a new ad for supporting data center tax breaks and aiming to make the state an AI hub. The ad reflects growing anti-data center sentiment across the country, from federal legislation to local opposition, as communities resist compute clusters in their backyards.

65, 100, 400 Tuesday. We have three big numbers to discuss, but first, I have to say my ‘ Backing Customer AI Deals Is Not Circular Revenue https://x.com/JensenHuang/status/2089331487342829862 ‘ shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt Today, we’re looking at how bipartisan data center agitation has become, food security, the value of data, and then 65, 100, and 400. To work — Alex 📈 Trending Up: Winnie https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/redfin-becomes-first-major-real-estate-portal-to-partner-with-winnie-to-display-childcare-information-on-home-listings-302852572.html get ’em Sara https://x.com/sm/status/2089347807765303644 … Limbo https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-18/trump-takes-hard-line-on-iran-as-hormuz-standoff-drags-on … measles https://www.propublica.org/article/measles-cases-vaccines … going it alone https://www.optimisticallie.com/p/changes … the truth https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/17/andrei-klepach-russian-banker-fired-warning-economy … anti-Indian racism https://x.com/spencerpratt/status/2089352631508500819 … Congressslop https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/17/ai-slop-lawmakers-congress-01008376 … ew https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/17/camera-equipped-airpods-macos-26-7/ … ChatGPT, just in time for the back-to-school season https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-for-teens … a helicopter for your burrito https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/17/uber-adds-zipline-drones-to-its-eats-delivery-network/ … Venice AI, after reaching $100 million ARR https://x.com/ErikVoorhees/status/2089375845425287610 … 📉 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/servicenow-pledges-1-5bn-investment-110000403.html Trending Down: European rivers https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/see-how-europes-rivers-are-drying-up-and-threatening-its-economy-8447228a?mod=hp lead pos9 … American lakes https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/6033231-lake-powell-record-low/ … Meta’s legal risk https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/17/meta-attorneys-general-california-federal-trial-astronomical-consequences.html … China’s electronics monopoly https://asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/supply-chain/exclusive-google-plans-to-stop-making-pixel-products-in-china-in-2027 … national sanity https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/17/us-kindergarten-vaccine-falls-cdc.html … The Rundown AI is a campaign issue : But not in the way that you might expect. In Wisconsin, Republican candidate for governor Tim Tiffany is attacking his Democratic rival David Crowley over the latter’s support for data centers https://x.com/akarl smith/status/2089433213819035985/photo/1 . In a new ad calling Crowley ‘Data Center David,’ Tiffany complains that the Democrat has protected data center tax breaks and called for the state to become “an AI and a data hub not only for the entire country, but for the entire globe.” That’s bad, the Republican argues. He writes that Wisconsin should not offer incentives for new data center construction, should protect ratepayers, end secret NDAs, and protect farmland and the local ecosystem from degradation. Sounds lefty - The anecdote reminds us that anti-data center agitation https://www.cautiousoptimism.news/all-that-data-center-agitation-is-working/ is a rare, bipartisan issue here in the United States. From the Hill https://tlaib.house.gov/posts/rep-tlaib-introduces-a-bill-to-ban-ai-data-centers-on-federal-lands to the sticks https://www.npr.org/2026/08/13/nx-s1-5928171/georgia-voters-find-solidarity-in-their-opposition-to-data-centers , people are irked that the Gods That Be are trying to put compute clusters in their backyards. - I think we should build nuclear power and data centers in our collective backyards in repeatable blocks, but then again I am not running for office, so I can get away with saying that out loud. How’s the harvest? Not good in Germany, where “ persistent heat and drought could wipe out entire harvests in some southern regions this year https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/farmers-warn-total-harvest-failure-parts-germany-due-heat-and-drought .” Poor in the UK, where farmers are unable to plant their next crop “ because the crops could fail to grow in the dry ground https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yvz2z27y9o .” Struggling in Kenya, where “corn yields are projected to fall by as much as 40%” due to extreme weather. Underwater in the Midwest, literally https://www.agweb.com/news/crops/crop-production/relentless-rain-muddies-crop-production-picture-across-corn-belt-ahead . Withering in India, where “ 64 percent of India’s agricultural area was experiencing drought stress due to insufficient rainfall https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/national/drought-woes-spread-across-india-despite-revival-of-monsoon-rains .” - I don’t want to sound like ZeroHedge, but the number of agricultural regions around the world suffering from a lack of water or the opposite is worrying. Mix in painful industrial fuel prices https://www.aol.com/articles/diesel-crack-just-broke-100-110226000.html , higher fertilizer prices https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/crops/article/2026/08/12/fertilizers-start-august-mixed-5-led , and it’s a hard time to farm. - We’ve spent so much time discussing chip sovereignty, compute sovereignty, AI sovereignty — perhaps we should pay a hair more attention to food security in the coming quarters. Picking the bones: News that Google outbid Mercor for the data remains of Spirit Airlines bounced around Twitter yesterday, underscoring the voracious appetite for data — and especially unique data — in the AI era. Here’s the viral snippet from the bankruptcy documents https://document.epiq11.com/document/getdocumentbycode?docId=4606206&projectCode=SPJ&source=DM in question via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com/spirit-airlines-is-dead-but-its-data-will-haunt-googles-servers-for-generations-to-come-2000799546 : In the filing, if you scroll to page 18, you can peep at what data Google snapped up: Customer data 97.5 million ‘customer profiles,’ 30.9 million ‘handled calls’ , ecommerce data, business data ‘deal pipelines, company and industry analyses, data room material,’ etc , information on 74.1 million flights, 787,452 parts, 6.1 million wifi purchases, 1.1 million time cards, and 3.4 million payroll records, not to mention 100 million emails, 500 million Teams chats, 30 million lines of code, and more. All for $10 million. Seems cheap, yeah? Everyone is hunting. Amazon recently caught grief from book fans guilty for quietly buying ‘rare’ books to debind and then ingest https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/ . Anthropic did something similar https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ . The carcasses of dead companies, the sacred printed knowledge of humanity — it doesn’t matter. AI wants to eat it. And has ready cash to pay in advance. Klarna and Baidu fall after earnings: Shares of European buy now, pay later giant Klarna are down sharply this morning after it announced surprise profit https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/klarna-posts-q2-profit-revenue-growth-trims-volume-outlook-113515385.html in the second quarter, but cut its full-year GMV forecast https://s205.q4cdn.com/644747736/files/doc earnings/2026/q2/earnings-result/Q2-26-Klarna-Group-plc-Press-Release.pdf from more than $155 billion to $149 billion-$151 billion due to a “more measured view of primarily German volumes, its largest market by volume.” Klarna’s CFO and CMO departing the company https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260818142503/en/Klarna-Announces-Planned-CFO-and-CMO-Transitions as it hits growth turbulence doesn’t help, either. - Klarna is worth just under $6 billion this morning, after its post-earnings selloff. Over in China, Baidu’s earnings missed https://www.barrons.com/articles/baidu-earnings-stock-price-01c70406 both revenue and profit expectations, with the well-known search giant’s top line falling 4% compared to the year-ago period https://ir.baidu.com/static-files/e57ce78e-e47a-4c0c-8797-3cb11c8c9b0a . Meanwhile, its cloud business soared. The ‘GPU Cloud’ subset of its ‘AI Cloud Infra’ group rose 283% year over year, while its parent category expanded 50% over the same time period. Sadly for investors, Baidu’s declining ‘legacy’ business results are falling too quickly for AI-derived growth to backfill at this juncture. 65, 100, 400 After fresh reporting on OpenAI’s revenue run rate and growth, it felt like only a matter of time until Dario and friends followed suit. And the market delivered. Here’s Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-17/anthropic-revenue-run-rate-surpasses-65-billion-ahead-of-ipo from Monday: Anthropic PBC is on track to generate annualized revenue of more than $65 billion based on its current performance, according to people familiar with the matter, up more than sevenfold from its pace at the end of last year. That number stunned. Investors described it as “insane” and “impressive,” per Axios reporter Madison Mills https://x.com/MadisonMills22/status/2089469553860342169 . It certainly made me sit up in my chair and blink twice. So much for the AI industry being all fad; the two leading players are generating revenue on a combined run rate of more than $100 billion, and will close the year far higher. How much higher? Anthropic’s $65 billion run rate is up from $47 billion in May. That’s 38% growth in a few months from a starting point of around four dozen billion. And even some of Anthropic’s most persistent critics think that it’s about to get much, much larger. In a recent episode of a business podcast https://podcasts.happyscribe.com/all-in-with-chamath-jason-sacks-friedberg/anthropic-s-2t-ipo-zuck-s-ai-manifesto-nvidia-s-500b-ai-bet-grok-s-comeback , a collection of investors including my former TWiST co-host, Jason Calacanis jawed that the Claude maker will wrap the year at a $100 billion to $120 billion run rate. Not that rivals intend to provide Anthropic a clear path to such scale. SpaceX, home of the quickly growing SpaceXAI neocloud and Cursor coding tools, has big plans of its own. From its first public earnings call official transcript https://s21.q4cdn.com/184289198/files/doc financials/2026/q2/SpaceX-Q2-2026-Earnings Transcript-FINAL.pdf , emphasis added : We believe this puts us on a trajectory, including contribution from Cursor, to reach $100 billion of ARR, or annualized revenue run rate, by the end of this year, based on our expected revenue in the month of December of this year. SpaceX later said that it has moved its timeline for reaching $1 trillion in revenue up from 2031 to 2030, but both dates are far enough in the future as to be cathedrals in the sky. What matters is that SpaceX and Anthropic could close the year at roughly the same $100 billion run rate. That sets up a very interesting revenue race between the two companies, which enjoy extensive market overlap. Hell, Anthropic’s compute demand is helping drive SpaceX’s growth via a compute deal. And the same investor set is more than a little bullish on where Anthropic will close out 2027. The All In cohort estimated that Anthropic will close out 2027 at a run rate between $400 billion and $500 billion. From $65 billion to $400 billion in what, a year and a half? Those numbers — if they come to pass– represent raw-dollar growth that we have never seen in the history of capitalism, even adjusting for inflation. - At a $400 billion run rate, Anthropic would be larger than Microsoft’s current size, after the software giant reported revenue of $90.0 billion in its most recent quarter, good for a run rate of $360 billion. Anthropic at a $65 billion run rate today is hard to fathom. The figure is too big for us startup-brained folks to comprehend. Anthropic and SpaceX at $100 billion run rates by the end of the year would be even more mind-bending, given where they were at the start of 2026. Anthropic reaching a $400 billion or greater run rate next year, according to investors who are far more invested in the Musk-sphere than anything Claude-related, is truly out of this world. Plenty of things could trip Anthropic up between today and the end of 2026, let alone the conclusion of 2027. The company could run low on compute. Could get tripped up by government regulation. Its decision to not release the second Mythos model boggles. And its rivals, including OpenAI, are working hard to offer cheaper models sold at an intelligence discount, while Anthropic wants to sell more expensive models at an intelligence premium Anthropic growing to a $100 billion run rate from $65 billion feels like a fait accompli. Quadrupling next year? That’s much harder.