Good morning. Big Tech companies like Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI are pledging billions of dollars to build AI infrastructure. As a result, a new breed of data center, designed from the ground up for AI workloads, is cropping up across the country, from the wilds of Wyoming to the deserts of Arizona.
But what exactly is inside these super-sized data centers? And how many people actually work inside of them? Check out this beautiful and informative illustration from the current issue of Fortune’s print magazine for an inside tour of a modern AI data center.
Today’s news below.
Alexei Oreskovic
@lexnfx
alexei.oreskovic@fortune.com
Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Fortune Tech? Drop a line here.
Tech Workers Want Their Bosses to Speak Up on ICE
More than 450 tech workers from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies have signed a letter urging their CEOs to condemn operations by the federal agency, cancel any company ICE contracts, and demand the federal agency leave U.S. cities. The letter follows the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. citizen, in Minneapolis on Saturday, less than three weeks after a federal agent shot and killed Renee Good in the same city.
The letter was issued by an organization called IceOut.Tech and is signed by employees from companies including Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and Salesforce.
While many of the top tech CEOs have kept mum about Pretti’s death (Apple's Tim Cook in particular has come under scathing attack for attending a movie about Melania Trump at the White House on the night of Prietti's death), a growing number of tech industry insiders have begun to speak out, including Google DeepMind's Jeff Dean, Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and Signal's Meredith Whittaker.
Since Trump’s election victory in 2024, many tech leaders have actively sought closer ties with the administration. CEOs including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg attended the president's inauguration in 2025 and made various donations to his inauguration fund; and some Big Tech companies have helped fund Trump’s construction of a ballroom in the White House’s East Wing. The letter argues that the tech industry already has proven leverage, pointing to the pressure put on the Trump administration when he threatened to send the National Guard to San Francisco in October, a threat the administration ultimately didn't carry out. "We can and must use our leverage to end this violence," the letter states. –Beatrice Nolan
Anthropic CEO sounds the AI alarm
A year and a half after publishing an optimistic tome about how AI could transform the world for the better, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is back with a far more serious and bleak manifesto called “The Adolescence of Technology.” It’s a 38-page treatise intended to “jolt people awake” to the imminent challenges of AI: “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”
The hour of reckoning is fast approaching, he says, noting that AI now writes much of the code at Anthropic, which is accelerating the creation of the next generation of AI systems. “This feedback loop is gathering steam month by month, and may be only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.”
Anthropic’s staff is preparing for the consequences. "All of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of our wealth,” and Anthropic’s staff have committed to donate company shares worth billions, Amodei says. He also says, “it may be feasible to pay human employees even long after they are no longer providing economic value in the traditional sense,” with Anthropic currently exploring “a range of possible pathways” for its employees to be announced in the near future.
Still, the irony is striking, even for a company founded on concerns about AI safety. While Amodei frames AI as a civilization-shaking technology, Anthropic is marketing it to CFOs and CIOs as a better way to write emails, summarize PDFs, and shave minutes off the workday – a remarkable blend of existential angst and commercial zeal.—Sharon Goldman
Nvidia buys a $2 billion piece of CoreWeave
Nvidia is upping its stake in CoreWeave, buying $2 billion worth of shares in the "neocloud" data center company. If this sounds like one of those "circular" deals you've been hearing a lot about lately in the AI industry, there's a good reason.
Nvidia is already an investor in CoreWeave, and in September Nvidia agreed to buy $6 billion worth of cloud services from CoreWeave over the next several years. As part of Monday's deal, Nvidia will provide CoreWeave with technology, including its new Vera CPU chips, to equip its collection of datacenters. In a press release announcing the deal, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang touted the "largest infrastructure buildout in human history," with the $2 billion investment a move to help CoreWeave build 5 gigawatts of new AI data centers by 2030 (5 gigawatts is roughly the amount of power generated by five large nuclear reactors according to Bloomberg).
Not mentioned in Monday's press release: the past year's steep run-up in CoreWeave's debt load, which has saddled its balance sheet with $14 billion in current and long-term debt. —AO
More tech
—EU opens inquiry into Elon Musk's X. Dissemination of Grok's sexualized images at issue.
—Y Combinator puts Canada on no-invest list.
—Microsoft's got a new AI chip. Meet the Maia 200.
—Zoom's ace in the hole: 2023 investment in Anthropic could be worth $4 billion.
—Meta testing subscriptions. Premium features for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.
— Billionaire Tom Steyer supports California wealth tax. 'I'd vote for it all day long.'
—Palantir ICE connections draw fire. A medicaid data tracking tool in the spotlight.
