Microsoft's new data center could use more power than an entire city
Press Clips #40 - Dec 2, 2025
Delivered to your inbox every Monday, Press Clips is a rundown of the previous week’s happenings in politics and tech in America. News, opinion, podcasts, and more, to bring you up to speed for the week ahead.
IN TODAY’S PRESS CLIPS…
Microsoft’s new data center could use more power than Los Angeles
David Sack’s clashes with NYT over his alleged conflicts of interest
Anthropic estimate that AI could double U.S. productivity growth
Over $20B in funding and acquisitions for startups
POLITICS
Anthropic estimates that AI could double U.S. productivity growth…
In newly published research, the frontier model lab analyzed over 100k Claude conversations to estimate the productivity gains of AI.
Extrapolating these estimates out suggests current-generation AI models could increase US labor productivity growth by 1.8% annually over the next decade—roughly twice the run rate in recent years.
This work is part of Anthropic’s Economic Index, a repository of data on the economic impacts of AI.
White House AI advisor David Sacks has hit back after a New York Times piece alleged conflicts of interest between his political role and his investments.
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rescinded Biden-era guidance on AI-assisted inventions, and their intellectual property status.
Federal preemption 2.0 refuses to go quietly…
This time, lawmakers are trying to tack it onto child online safety regulation.
TECH
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, competing with OpenAI’s GPT 5.1 and Google’s Gemini 3 to achieve top benchmark scores.
Could the release of Opus 4.5 spell the end of Nvidia’s reign at the top?
For a long time, there was no serious alternative to Nvidia’s GPUs when it came to training and running the most powerful models.
BUT with the release of Anthropic’s new flagship model, the two current best models in the world (Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3) were trained primarily on Google’s TPUs and Amazon’s Trainium.
It was a big week in the capital markets, with over $20B raised, including…
Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus ($6.2B)
Lambda ($1.5B)
Luma AI ($900M)
Physical Intelligence ($600M)
Microsoft’s Fairwater datacenter may use more power than Los Angeles…
EpochAI estimate that the Wisconsin datacenter will have a peak electrical load of 3.3 GW when its fourth building comes online in 2027.
By contrast, the entire city of Los Angeles used 2.4 GW in 2023.
OpenAI suffered a third-party breach on November 25.
TOP READS
🎥 Ilya Sutskever – We’re moving from the age of scaling to the age of research (Dwarkesh Patel Podcast)
✍️ Six reasons to think there’s an AI bubble — and six reasons not to (Timothy B. Lee and Derek Thompson)
✍️ Reflections on Claude Opus 4.5 (Dean Ball)
✍️ The Night Before Preemption: Three dynamics to watch as the fighting begins (Anton Leicht)
📊 5 interesting AI Safety & Responsibility papers (AI Policy Perspectives)
✍️ Tech keeps accelerating. Humans can’t. Could AI save us? (AI Policy Perspectives)
✍️ Will AI safety become a mass movement? (Transformer)
✍️ How bad policy can offset the AI boom (James Pethokoukis)
✍️ How a Government Think Tank Trained The First Generation of US Software Developers (Brian Potter)