(Planet Labs PBC)

Elon Musk’s Colossus 2 data center is “MACROHARD”

Satellite photos of the roof of xAI’s new Colossus 2 data center shout a message to the world that it aims to take on Microsoft.

Jon Keegan

10/22/25 1:28PM

You can’t say Elon Musk doesn’t follow through on his weirdest side quests.

In August, Musk posted on X that xAI was going to build software to compete with Microsoft’s ubiquitous productivity apps. As he likes to do, Musk picked a name that would make middle school boys giggle: Macrohard.

Musk explained: “In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI.”

Musk’s followers weren’t sure if this was just another meme-worthy gag, but he doubled down on the project in follow-up posts.

Musk posted that xAI was so serious about building the Macrohard software suite that he would emblazon the name on the roof of the company’s 1-gigawatt Colossus 2 data center in South Memphis, Tennessee:

We are literally painting MACROHARD on the roof of the Colossus II supercompute cluster in Memphis big enough so you can read it from space
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 16, 2025

We have been monitoring the Colossus 2 site from satellite photos, and Planet Labs helped us out with some great shots of the new signage, which can in fact be seen from space.

On October 9, the roof of the larger of the two main buildings at the Colossus 2 site was a featureless white. But by October 11, the first large letters appeared on the roof. By October 13, the work was complete.

(Photos: Planet Labs PBC)

The data center sits on the southern border of Tennessee, to take advantage of imported energy from Alabama, coming from the power plant it operates just down the road from Colossus 2.

Musk is reportedly racing to finish construction of the site, but needs another $18 billion to secure the remaining 300,000 Nvidia GPUs to power the facility, which will be used for running and training xAI’s Grok AI model.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5