Cassidy: Two of the biggest labs in the world went shopping for electricity on the same day — and one of them bought a piece of its own chip supplier
Cassidy: while it was there. This is the AI Daily Briefing.
Cassidy: Today: OpenAI in Georgia, Anthropic tangled up with AMD, and the one story on the board that isn't about buying compute at all.
Bill: Follow the show and the next briefing lands in your feed on its own.
Cassidy: Quartz, with Cris Tolomia:
Quote: OpenAI announced plans Wednesday to build a data center campus in Effingham County
Quote: Georgia committing $20 billion to the project in order to qualify for a local incentive package.
Quote: The facility named Project Camellia
Quote: is located within the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub
Quote: about 45 minutes outside of Savannah
Quote: and would be the first data center that OpenAI is designing and building itself.
Cassidy: OpenAI's putting $20 billion into a campus outside Savannah — Project Camellia
Cassidy: with 3.2 gigawatts contracted straight from Georgia Power and a phased build from 2028 to 2032.
Cassidy: Read the fine print: it's a 25-year agreement with up to a thousand megawatts of demand response.
Cassidy: That goes way beyond a tenancy.
Cassidy: It's a long-term dependency on the utility.
Cassidy: And it's the first data center OpenAI is designing and building itself — no Microsoft in the middle.
Cassidy: So now a regional grid is load-planning around one lab's model roadmap.
Cassidy: Georgia Power's whole peak strategy has a new co-author, and his name is Sam.
Bill: The number I keep circling is the calendar.
Bill: Six-year build window, fully online in 2032.
Bill: OpenAI is committing $20 billion to power that arrives after the next two or three model generations — and demand in 2032 might look nothing
Bill: like it does today. That $20 billion figure is also the threshold for the local incentive package.
Bill: Normally, a customer prepays to de-risk the build.
Bill: Here, the commitment unlocks the subsidy — same money, with the mechanics flipped.
Cassidy: They swear existing Georgia Power customers won't see a rate bump.
Cassidy: I'd hold onto that receipt until 2032 and check it against reality.
Cassidy: SiliconANGLE writes:
Quote: Anthropic PBC will purchase up to 2 gigawatts’ worth of graphics cards from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Quote: as part of a multibillion-dollar deal announced today.
Quote: The partnership also has several other components.
Quote: Notably, AMD will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic and use Claude to speed up its software development efforts.
Bill: The part that stopped me: AMD puts up to five billion into Anthropic
Bill: and Anthropic turns around and buys up to two gigawatts of GPUs from AMD.
Bill: The vendor's funding the customer, which is committing to buy from the vendor.
Bill: The money runs in a circle.
Cassidy: Your chip supplier is also a five-billion-dollar shareholder
Cassidy: so every future “our silicon beats Nvidia” benchmark from either side comes with a footnote.
Cassidy: Remember where Anthropic was — scrambling and renting spare racks off Meta.
Cassidy: Now they're contracting at the chip level with equity attached.
Cassidy: That's a different company from the one we were describing a few days ago.
Bill: The spec sheet is genuinely spicy, though.
Bill: The Helios rack has 31 terabytes of HBM4, fifty percent more memory than Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems.
Bill: On paper, that gives Anthropic a cost-per-token edge.
Bill: But that edge depends on AMD's MI450 roadmap shipping on time.
Bill: If it slips behind Nvidia, that circular structure gets uncomfortable fast.
Cassidy: Put today's two deals side by side: OpenAI locks down 3.2 gigawatts through an owned Georgia campus
Cassidy: while Anthropic locks down two through a vendor equity loop.
Cassidy: The deal structures differ, but both are racing to secure power.
Bill: Right — one buys the building, one marries the supplier.
Bill: Same power hunger in two different suits.
Cassidy: Here's Sean Mitchell at DataCenterNews:
Quote: Production of NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 AI system is ramping up
Quote: with racks already running at CoreWeave
Quote: Google Cloud Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Quote: The rollout marks the commercial arrival of NVIDIA's latest rack-scale AI platform
Quote: backed by a supply chain spanning more than 350 factory sites across 30 countries.
Bill: So after a week of me asking whether any of these compute contracts are real cash or just press releases, here's the answer.
Bill: Vera Rubin NVL72 racks are already running at CoreWeave, Google Cloud, Azure, and Oracle.
Bill: Live silicon, four clouds, all at once.
Cassidy: And there's no demo video to squint at here.
Cassidy: It shipped with customers plugged in, which tells you the demand behind this week's spending is already real.
Bill: Which is exactly why the Anthropic-AMD deal we just hit makes me nervous.
Bill: AMD's putting five billion into a customer that's committing to buy AMD GPUs
Bill: while NVIDIA's next-gen system is already in production across the hyperscalers.
Cassidy: Right. If you're Anthropic, you've locked gigawatts to a roadmap that's chasing a system already live somewhere else.
Bill: That's the unit-economics question nobody's answering.
Bill: NVIDIA claims sixth-gen NVLink doubles throughput on the hard workloads.
Bill: If AMD falls even one generation behind
Bill: the circular capital loop starts looking a lot more expensive than the five-billion-dollar headline suggests.
Cassidy: NVIDIA's whole pitch is that seven chips across five rack trays come as one package.
Cassidy: You don't assemble it; you buy the system.
Cassidy: That's a lot of lock-in for a platform that just went from slide to server room.
Cassidy: Here's Maddie McGay at NorthJersey.com:
Quote: Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a law on July 20 that starting next summer will restrict landlords from using algorithms to set rents
Quote: a practice state officials said helped drive up costs through unlawful coordination.
Quote: Taking effect on July 1
Quote: 2027 the FAIR — Forbidding the Algorithmic Inflation of Rent — Act will prohibit landlords from using software the recommends rents by
Quote: assessing private data shared by competing landlords.
Bill: Okay, one story on today's board that isn't a gigawatt announcement.
Bill: Governor Sherrill signed New Jersey's FAIR Act on Monday.
Bill: It bans landlords from using algorithms to set rents based on pooled private data from competing landlords.
Bill: The state isn't calling this unsafe AI.
Bill: Sherrill literally called it “collusion by algorithm.” It's an antitrust theory dressed up as an AI bill.
Cassidy: Right, and it's aimed squarely at RealPage.
Cassidy: New Jersey sued the company back in April 2025, and the DOJ has a case too.
Cassidy: The law's codifying the theory that lawsuit was testing.
Bill: Look at the mechanism: occupancy levels and lease termination dates, all shared across competitors into one recommendation engine.
Bill: Take the word “AI” out, and you've got a price-fixing cartel with a nicer UI.
Cassidy: And there's a real deadline: July 1, 2027.
Cassidy: That's an actual compliance date for a deployed system, which is more than most of the safety talk in Congress produces.
Cassidy: From Sean O'Kane at TechCrunch:
Quote: Travis Kalanick’s robotics company, Atoms, has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Quote: Ben Horowitz will join the company’s board following the investment.
Quote: Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and others participated in the round.
Quote: Perhaps most notably, Uber also joined the funding round, re-connecting Kalanick with the company he founded
Bill: Atoms — Travis Kalanick's robotics thing — just pulled $1.7 billion, with a16z leading and Ben Horowitz taking a board seat.
Bill: And I want to know what's behind that number, because it isn't shipped robots.
Bill: This is a holding company built on top of Cloud Kitchens, plus Pronto, the heavy-industry automation outfit run by Anthony Levandowski.
Bill: That's $1.7 billion for a rebrand built around an acquisition, with a mining ambition on top.
Bill: A lot of conviction for something that hasn't cleared a warehouse floor.
Cassidy: And there's no technical disclosure attached to any of it.
Cassidy: I'd use the same bar as I would for any lab demo.
Cassidy: With no receipts beyond a Getty photo and an X post, a robotics raise this big is still a marketing event.
Cassidy: The part that actually made me blink is Uber joining the round.
Cassidy: The company that pushed Kalanick out in 2017 over the harassment and toxic-culture complaints is now writing a check into his next thing.
Cassidy: That's some reunion.
Bill: Right, and compare it with what we just covered — OpenAI committing $20 billion to power it can point to, Anthropic locking down gigawatts.
Bill: At least those bets attach to something physical.
Bill: Here, $1.7 billion is riding on a vibe and Levandowski's résumé.
Cassidy: I'll give you the honest version: a16z has been right about founders everyone else wouldn't touch.
Cassidy: But I'd like to see the thing before I grade the round.
Cassidy: For more on the infrastructure behind the AI boom, check out The Data Center Daily.
Cassidy: It covers hyperscaler spending, the power grid, semiconductor supply, and the energy markets being reshaped by intelligence at scale.
Cassidy: Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Cassidy: A few dates to watch: Project Camellia's Georgia Power service is expected to come online in phases between 2028 and 2032.
Cassidy: Anthropic and AMD plan to begin deploying MI450-based Helios hardware in the first half of 2027.
Cassidy: New Jersey's FAIR Act restrictions on AI-powered rent-setting software take effect July 1, 2027.
Cassidy: Links to every story are in the show notes if you'd like to dig deeper.
Cassidy: That's it for today's AI Daily Briefing.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.