Cafe655 Ai Field Notes Barista Painting Services Cafe655 on Twitch Cafe655 Personal
← All Reports

Drawn on the board · 18 September 2026

Where Your Words Go

You hit send in Huntsville, Alabama. Four hundred and eighty-five miles almost exactly due north, a building on old farmland in Indiana does the thinking.

10 sources, listed at the bottom Every figure is marked with where it came from

How to read the marks: said so themselves Anthropic or Amazon, on the record reported a news outlet, not the company estimate outside analysis, never disclosed physics arithmetic, not a claim

The route

What actually happens when you hit send

Nine stops. Three of them happen on your own desk.

your PC everything, every turn one piece at a time one copy of Claude, across a row of chips more copies on other floors, in other buildings strangers' requests, in the same batch and again, every time a command runs on your PC 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

On your desk

1

You type.

Nothing has left the room. Your keystrokes are sitting in a program on your own machine.

2

The envelope gets packed.

Your sentence, plus every earlier message in the session, plus your instruction files, plus the contents of every file that has been read. That whole bundle is what you pay for, not the sentence you typed.

9

And if a command runs, it runs here.

Reading a file, running a script, opening a program, all on your PC. Only the result goes back in the envelope, and the loop starts over. One message from you can be a dozen round trips.

Out the wire

3

Sealed and sent.

Encrypted, out through your router, across the internet to Anthropic's front door. Nothing is computed on your PC.

8

Nothing you sent changed it.

The model is read-only while it answers. The only reason it remembers this conversation is that the entire transcript is mailed back up with every single turn.

Inside the building

4

A doorman picks a room.

Whichever cluster has space at that instant. You never find out which building answered, and it can be a different one next time.

5

The model is already awake.

Nothing is loaded up for you. One working copy is spread across a row of chips wired together, far too big to fit on one, and those chips were already holding it before you arrived.

6

You share a bench.

Your request is worked on alongside strangers' requests, in the same batch, on the same copy. The chips are far more efficient doing a crowd than doing one.

7

One piece at a time.

Each word-piece is sent the moment it exists. That is why the answer types itself out instead of appearing whole.

The wait, measured

The distance is not what you are waiting for

Light in a glass fibre covers 485 miles in about four thousandths of a second. Real internet paths wander and add equipment, so call it twenty to forty milliseconds there and back. Set against a Claude answer that takes several seconds, the travel is almost nothing.

the model thinking, about 8 seconds 0 s 0.03 s, the entire trip 8 s out back the whole trip to Indiana and home: roughly 0.03 seconds about half of one percent of the wait
The four-millisecond floor is arithmetic: 485 miles at two thirds the speed of light. physics The eight seconds stands in for a typical answer; it is not a measurement of yours.

Which is why nobody builds one of these near Huntsville. Moving it closer saves you hundredths of a second; putting it where the electricity is cheap saves billions.

The buildings

Whose machines are they?

Until this year Anthropic owned none of them. It rents, at enormous scale, from Amazon, from Google, and since May from Elon Musk. Tap a place to read it.

485 miles almost exactly due north INDIANA the big one TENNESSEE rented from Musk MISSISSIPPI TEXAS three sites NEW YORK being built ALABAMA where the AI Field Notes computer sits WHAT THE DOTS MEAN Amazon's buildings rented from SpaceX Anthropic's own, going up now announced, years away you
The pattern is not an accident. These places follow cheap power, water and land, which in America means the middle and the south, not the coasts.

Google supplies up to a million of its own AI chips out of Google Cloud said so themselves and does not say which buildings they sit in. Anthropic's own policy says traffic may be routed to the United States, Europe, Asia or Australia, and that stored data stays in the United States. said so themselves

Scale

Measured in power stations, not square feet

These places are sized by how much electricity they can pull. A gigawatt is a thousand megawatts, roughly what a large nuclear reactor puts out, or what 700,000 homes draw.

06001,200 1,8002,400 MW New Carlisle, IN power plant at Waco Memphis, TN Barber Lake, TX 3 more sites 2,200 1,600 300 207 18 of 32 buildings running; 2,200 when the last one finishes its own natural gas plant, standing beside the campus running now, rented whole from SpaceX leased in two bites, 168 then 39 Canton, Rockdale and Upstate New York: power not published Indiana is Amazon’s own figure. The Waco plant and the Texas leases are reported, not announced.

Money

What it costs to rent the world's chips

$0$10 bn$20 bn $30 bn$40 bn$50 bn Anthropic’s own US build Memphis rent, full term Amazon’s Indiana build the Meta talks $50 bn $45 bn $11 bn $10 bn announced Nov 2025; Texas and New York; sites opening through 2026 $1.25 bn every month to May 2029 plus $9.1 bn for the Rockdale lease alone early talks only; nothing signed

Anthropic took the whole Memphis building off Elon Musk in May 2026, and said the capacity was for Claude Pro and Max subscribers. reported The Meta deal runs the other way from how it is usually told: Meta would rent its spare capacity to Anthropic. Anthropic is the buyer in both. reported

How it got here

Twelve months of buying electricity

Sept 2025

168 megawatts, west Texas

A lease at Barber Lake, and the first move of the run.

Oct 2025

Indiana switches on

Amazon opens Project Rainier at New Carlisle: $11 billion, 1,200 acres, around half a million of its own AI chips, and exactly one customer. said so themselves

Nov 2025

$50 billion of its own

Anthropic announces it will build in Texas and New York rather than only rent. Another 39 megawatts added at Barber Lake the same month. said so themselves

May 2026

The whole of Memphis

Anthropic takes every chip in SpaceX's Colossus 1, over 220,000 of them and 300 megawatts, for $1.25 billion a month until May 2029. Musk had already moved Grok's training next door. reported

July 2026

Talking to Meta

Early conversations about renting roughly $10 billion more, over two years, from Meta's spare capacity. reported

Aug 2026

The Texas sites surface

A $9.1 billion lease on a shut-down aluminium smelter at Rockdale, and a campus near Waco with its own 1.6-gigawatt gas plant attached. reported

Through 2026

Looking outside America

The first data centre staff hired outside the United States: London, covering Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin, and a second post in Australia. reported

Two last things

Who owns the chips, and why your terminal costs more than your phone

Amazon · 65% Google · 30% 5% Amazon's own AI chips, built for Anthropic Google's AI chips everything else
Nobody at Anthropic published this split. It is an outside estimate of where Claude actually runs. estimate
a short conversation on your phone

It cannot see this PC, read a file here, or run anything. It carries the chat and nothing else, so it is cheap.

the session + your rules + every file read in Claude Code

It carries your instruction files, the list of tools it may use, and the contents of everything it has opened, which is why a turn here costs many times a phone message.

Provenance

How this board was made

Nothing here came out of memory. Every figure was looked up on the day it was drawn, and the ones that could not be verified are marked as such.

The question it is answering

Asked on 18 September 2026, in a Claude Code session, and it came in three parts:

  • How many data centres does Anthropic have, and is it public where they are?
  • When I type a prompt and hit send, what gets done on my computer, where does it go, and is there one copy of the model or a hundred?
  • Is my phone doing the same thing as my terminal, or does each have its own?

What was read

  • Nine web searches run on 18 September 2026, all inside one session.
  • Anthropic's privacy centre page on server locations was fetched in full and is quoted directly.
  • Company announcements were preferred over coverage wherever both existed: Anthropic's own newsroom for the $50 billion build and the Google chip deal, Amazon's for Project Rainier.
  • Financial and lease figures come from CNBC, Data Center Dynamics, Data Center Frontier and Axios. No paywalled or anonymous sourcing was used.

What is solid and what is not

  • Solid: the Indiana site, its size and its opening date; the $50 billion programme; the Google chip supply; Anthropic's stated routing and storage policy.
  • Reported, not announced: the Memphis rent, the Texas leases, the Meta talks, the overseas hiring.
  • Estimated by outsiders: the 65 / 30 / 5 split. Anthropic has never published it.
  • Chip counts at the Indiana site disagree between sources: roughly half a million at opening, reported above a million since. The lower, first-party figure is the one used here.

What nobody publishes

  • Which building answered any particular message of yours. Not disclosed, and it varies.
  • Where Google's Anthropic capacity physically sits, and where the CoreWeave capacity is. Between them that is a large share of Claude, on a map nobody can draw.
  • Power figures for the Mississippi, Rockdale and New York sites.
  • The steps inside the building (the doorman, the row of chips, the shared batch) are the ordinary public description of how any large model is served. They are not a disclosure about Anthropic's own setup, and no insider knowledge went into them.

How the drawing was made

  • The map outline was plotted by hand from latitude and longitude, not traced from an image. Every marker sits at its real coordinates on that grid.
  • The shaky line is a filter applied to clean vectors, not a scan of a real board.
  • The 485 miles is the straight-line distance from Huntsville, Alabama to New Carlisle, Indiana; the two sit within a tenth of a degree of the same longitude.
  • Light in fibre travels at about two thirds of its speed in vacuum, which puts the floor for that round trip near eight thousandths of a second.

Who made it

  • Built in one session in Claude Code, on Claude Opus 5, on 18 September 2026.
  • Sixth version. Redrawn three times against the reader's own notes on it.

The sources, and what each one holds up

Anthropic: $50 billion in American infrastructure

The build programme, the Texas and New York sites, the 2026 timing. First-party.

Anthropic privacy centre: where the servers are

Quoted directly: traffic may be routed to the US, Europe, Asia and Australia; data is stored in the US. First-party.

Anthropic: the Google and Broadcom deal

Access to up to a million of Google's AI chips. First-party.

CNBC: Amazon opens Project Rainier

New Carlisle, Indiana. $11 billion, 1,200 acres, chip count at opening, Anthropic as sole tenant.

Data Center Dynamics: Colossus 1

Memphis, 220,000+ chips, 300 megawatts, the monthly rent and the term, and the note about Pro and Max capacity.

CNBC: the Meta talks

Roughly $10 billion over two years, early stage, Anthropic as the buyer. Nothing signed.

Axios: the Texas campuses

The $9.1 billion Rockdale lease on the old smelter site, and the Waco campus with its own gas plant.

Data Center Frontier: inside the multi-cloud setup

The 65 / 30 / 5 estimate, and AWS described as the primary provider. Outside analysis.

Data Center Dynamics: a dozen more letters of intent

The signed-but-unbuilt campuses, and the 2027 and 2028 delivery dates behind the hollow rings on the map.

CNBC: hunting smaller data centre deals

Published the same day this board was drawn: the CoreWeave capacity arriving through 2026 at sites that are not named.

← Back to Reports