Nvidia just printed $81.6 billion in one quarter, Anthropic quietly locked in $15 billion a year for compute, and FERC is warning that 4,500 megawatts of Colorado River hydro might not make it through the summer. This is The Data Center Daily — I'm Cassidy, Matt's here — and the demand side finally has receipts. The grid, apparently, did not get the memo. Three huge dollar figures, zero new megawatts on the Colorado River, and one IPO filing that said the quiet part out loud. Let's get into it. Nvidia's quarter, the Anthropic-SpaceX disclosure, Blackstone's Google Cloud vehicle, and FERC's curtailment warning — that's the whole arc today. James Dargan, writing in AI Insider:
Nvidia has reported record quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion for the three months ending April 26, up twenty percent from the previous quarter, driven by $75.2 billion in data centre revenue. The company forecast $91 billion for the coming quarter and authorised $80 billion in share repurchases.
Nvidia, quarter ending April 26: $81.6 billion in total revenue, $75.2 billion of that from data centers, up twenty percent from the prior quarter. Forward guidance is $91 billion. That's the supply-side receipt we've been waiting for — the $630 billion capex stack we named Tuesday now has a manufacturer's timestamp on it. And Jensen Huang told investors on the earnings call that compute capacity being built for Anthropic this year and next is "substantial" — his word — after describing prior Anthropic coverage as basically zero. That's a massive revenue ramp tied to one customer, and he said it on the call, not in a press release. So yeah, we can hold him to it. The number I keep coming back to is the private side: Nvidia's privately held stakes nearly doubled in one quarter — from $22 billion to $43 billion — on $18.5 billion in purchases. The prior quarter it was $649 million. That's not a portfolio tweak; that's a strategic shift, fast. And then there's the $200 billion US investment pledge — same problem we flagged with Amazon's $200 billion last week. What's actually contracted capacity, and what's just capex intent? Nvidia still hasn't broken that out, and "committed" is doing a lot of work there when the grid is already choking on what's in the queue. Here's Andrew J. Hawkins at The Verge:
In its S-1 filing, SpaceX said that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for access to SpaceX’s AI training centers at Colossus I and Colossus II. That’s $15 billion annually, which could nearly double the $18.7 billion in revenue that SpaceX reported in all of 2025.
$15 billion a year for xAI's Colossus facilities in Memphis — $1.25 billion a month through May 2029. We only have that number because SpaceX put it in an S-1, which is a securities filing with legal exposure attached, not a press release where you can smooth the edges. And buried in that same S-1 is a 90-day termination clause. So Anthropic can walk in month four. That's not a take-or-pay capacity commitment — that's the most expensive short-term bridge loan in data center history. Put the scale next to SpaceX's 2025 revenue — $18.7 billion total — and Anthropic, at this run rate, is nearly doubling it. The S-1 had to disclose it as a material customer relationship, which is why the number exists in public at all. If Anthropic uses that termination clause, Colossus I and II are staring at a stranded-asset problem that makes every announced-but-unsigned hyperscaler deal we've talked about this week look cautious. Who's eating the Memphis infrastructure if the checks stop in August? From FinTech Magazine:
Blackstone is committing an initial US$5bn in equity through funds it manages, with the first 500MW of capacity slated to come online in 2027. Google will underpin the platform with its hardware, software and operational expertise, including its tensor processing units (TPUs) – custom-built chips designed specifically for AI workloads.
Blackstone is putting in $5 billion in equity, the first 500 megawatts are slated for 2027, and the compute product is Google Cloud TPUs, not generic capacity. That's the missing piece from Wednesday: the anchor tenant is Google Cloud itself, and now the vehicle has a name. So Google Cloud is the anchor tenant, the chip supplier, and the operational partner. That's a lot of Google in one structure for something being sold as an "alternative pathway" to Google Cloud. Alternative for who, exactly? The stranded-asset question gets sharper now that the vehicle is named: Blackstone is carrying $5 billion in equity on infrastructure built for one chip architecture, with 2027 as the in-service date. If TPU demand softens or Google's roadmap moves, that's not a general-purpose data hall you can just flip. Five billion in equity, 500 megawatts, one chip family. The capital attribution is cleaner than it was two days ago, I'll give them that. But I still want the power contract before I buy the 2027 date, because 500 megawatts doesn't just materialize. From Daily Energy Insider:
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission voted unanimously to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking that would roughly double the cost thresholds for its blanket natural gas certificate program and expand the categories of pipeline projects eligible for streamlined review. The commission also received its 2026 Summer Energy Market and Electric Reliability Assessment, which flagged record capacity additions nationwide but warned that drought conditions could idle up to 4,500 megawatts of hydropower along the Colorado River system by August.
FERC voted five-to-zero yesterday to roughly double the cost caps on its blanket natural gas certificate program, and it came out of the same meeting where they released the 2026 summer reliability assessment. The big number there: drought could knock 4,500 megawatts of Colorado River hydropower offline by August. So on the same day, the commission is making gas infrastructure faster and cheaper to build, while warning that a major hydro basin is losing 4,500 megawatts this summer. That's not a hedge, that's a confession. The gas buildout is the contingency plan for the water problem they just named. We've been running the interconnection.fyi 36-gigawatt queue intake number all week. Now that queue is sitting on the same western grid that just got handed a possible 4,500-MW supply hit for August. Those two numbers belong in the same sentence. And we've been talking about IID water stress since Monday, which was background risk. FERC just put a megawatt figure and a date on it. August. 4,500 megawatts. That's not a modeling exercise anymore — that's a curtailment range sitting inside a unanimous commission vote. Craig Smith, writing in KGUN 9:
After hearing from protestors worried the center would use too much water for cooling, Tucson City Council refused to annex the site—and refused to provide water for anything to do with the project. Beale Infrastructure, the company behind Project Blue promised a new design that would be air cooled and use water the way any building would—for bathrooms and fire protection. The permits do say the well water is for drinking and fire suppression.
Project Blue in Tucson — KGUN 9 got the Arizona Department of Water Resources well permits, two wells on the eastern edge of the site, and the drill rig is already on the ground. The developer's claim in those permit documents: water use will be "like a typical commercial building." A permit is something you can actually read, and that "like a typical commercial building" line is doing a lot of work when the Tucson City Council already refused annexation and refused to provide city water. They're not on the municipal system; they're drilling their own wells into the aquifer. Context matters here: Beale Infrastructure redesigned this to air-cool specifically because the council wouldn't annex, so the cooling-water fight was already off the table. What the permits are really showing is domestic and process use, two wells, private groundwater, no city hookup. This is the second time this week I've heard "like a typical commercial building" in a data center water disclosure — Google's Missouri air-cooled announcement used the same framing on May 21. That's a communications template. The real question is whether the well permit volumes actually back it up, because those numbers should be in the filing. If you follow the infrastructure behind AI, check out Anthropic Pentagon Watch — a daily briefing on Anthropic's fight with the DoD over Claude, military AI use, autonomous weapons, and procurement blacklisting. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
You'll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can follow it there and dig in a bit more.
That's The Data Center Daily for this Friday. Thanks for listening, and have a great weekend. This is a Lantern Podcast.