Monday, November 2, 2026 · 5 min read
Together with
Elon Musk's AI company has to face the NAACP in court over the gas turbines powering its giant supercomputer, after a federal judge refused on Friday to throw the case out.
OpenAI has cut the money it's trying to raise by a third, to $20 billion, and dropped its asking price too.
Let Meerkat explain.
xAI, the NAACP and a power plant on trailers
OpenAI asks for $10 billion less
Big Tech's $740 billion spending bill, in one chart
Election day, AMD and Friday's jobs report
SCOREBOARD
NVIDIA | MICROSOFT | ALPHABET |
META | AMAZON | ORACLE |
S&P 500 | NASDAQ | VIX |
Friday close. S&P down 1.8%, and the Nasdaq had its worst day since June. On the week: Nvidia −3.0%, S&P −0.6%, Nasdaq −2.0%. Prices via CNBC.
ON WATCH
Musk's turbines go to court
The S&P 500 fell 1.8% on Friday. In Mississippi, a federal judge refused to throw out the NAACP's lawsuit against xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, over the power plant behind its Colossus 2 supercomputer.
The NAACP says xAI ran dozens of gas turbines at Southaven without an air permit. Earthjustice, one of its law firms, puts the pollution at more than 5,000 tons of smog-forming gases a year.
xAI argued the turbines were exempt because they sit on trailers, and Mississippi's own regulator once agreed. The judge ruled the plant "was not (and is not)" a mobile source, so the case goes on.
On Saturday Musk said two more buildings, nicknamed Gun Range and Spam, will be running by December. That would take Colossus 2 to about 1.2 million Nvidia chips.
xAI, now part of SpaceX, didn't respond to the ruling straight away. That said, it won a permit in March for a permanent 1.2-gigawatt plant, and says its 69 temporary turbines will be gone by July 2027.
MEERKAT'S TAKE: The permanent plant may well fix this. The trouble is that the chips went in first and the permits came later, and the neighbours lived with the gap.
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THE MACHINE
OpenAI asks for less
OpenAI has cut the target for its latest fundraising from $30 billion to $20 billion, the Financial Times reported on Friday. It's also asking a lower price, $1.25 trillion for the company, down from the $1.4 trillion it pitched a month ago.
The Wall Street Journal says only about $11 billion had been promised by Friday, with "tepid interest" from some big investors. OpenAI plans to fill the gap from family offices and wealthy individuals over the coming weeks.
Let Meerkat translate. A company asking for less money, at a lower price, from smaller investors is finding the big ones harder to convince.
OpenAI's answer is that this round was always an "opportunistic" extra before its own stock market listing, which it's aiming for next year. It banked $122 billion only in March.
QUICK PAUSE. WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? OpenAI's price tag is the yardstick for every AI company raising money, and Anthropic is about to set its own on the Nasdaq. If $1.25 trillion is a stretch for OpenAI's backers, Anthropic's hoped-for $1.5 trillion gets harder to sell.
SOMEONE SMART SAID
If consciousness started to emerge in training, I would call for everyone to stop AI development until we could design out those properties.
Suleyman runs Microsoft's AI division. In a post on X on Sunday, he said today's AI models aren't conscious and can't suffer, and that building conscious ones would be "reckless".
He also said any lab with evidence that a model is conscious, or conscious enough to deserve welfare, must disclose it publicly at once. That's aimed at Anthropic, which has made "model welfare" part of its rules for Claude. Suleyman says he disagrees, though he praised it for publishing its reasoning.
That's a promise to stop from the boss of one of the world's biggest AI spenders. His post doesn't say who would decide that consciousness had started to emerge, or how.
THE CHART
The AI spending bill
Combined capital spending of the four biggest US cloud and AI spenders, $bn a year, 2021 to 2025 (company filings)
The four biggest AI spenders put $388 billion into data centres and equipment last year, up from $110 billion in 2021. Their latest guidance for this year adds up to about $740 billion, nearly double.
That's Amazon at roughly $220 billion, Alphabet up to $205 billion, Microsoft $170 billion and Meta up to $145 billion, per CNBC. On Friday S&P Global turned its outlook on Meta's credit rating negative, saying Meta has no cloud to rent out and will burn $39 billion more than it brings in this year, and $71 billion in 2027.
Meta says it "respectfully" disagrees about how well it can make AI pay. On the other hand, the rating itself stays at AA-, and Meta's sales grew 26% last quarter.
WHAT TO WATCH: The next dot on this chart is 2026's real total, which the four confirm with their results early next year. Anything near $740 billion means the bill nearly doubled in a year; well under $650 billion means someone stepped off the gas.
HEADS UP
Anthropic tells Claude to stop remaking games · Two new sentences steer Claude Code away from copying a specific existing game. Anthropic says using Claude to infringe IP breaks its rules.
The big labs agree a "no training" sign · Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI will honour one website setting that opts out of AI training. Only Anthropic has switched it on so far.
Anthropic's IPO walks into a rough week · Its prospectus showed an $80 billion first-half loss and over 90 pages of risk factors, days before AI stocks sold off hard.
OpenAI passed 200 threats to police · OpenAI says it made more than 200 law enforcement referrals over potential violence in the third quarter. It doesn't say how many led anywhere.
The Nasdaq's worst month since March 2025 · It ended October 7.8% below its early-month record. Intel fell 28.6% on Friday, its worst day since 1974.
ON THE HORIZON
When (ET) | What |
|---|---|
Mon 2 Nov · after close | Apple results (EPS est. $1.98, Nasdaq) |
Tue 3 Nov | US midterm elections; AMD results after the close |
Tue 3 Nov | Sen. Warren's deadline for Anthropic's answers on its IPO |
Fri 6 Nov · 8:30am | October jobs report |
Mon 9 Nov | Delaware's papers on AI-run companies due to Rep. Comer |
MEERKAT ON YOUTUBE
Bill Gates Just Warned Of 20 Years Of AI Chaos! The most famous optimist in tech now calls AI the most dangerous thing humanity has built, and has drawn up a list of jobs he thinks people get to keep. Meerkat walks through the whole warning in plain English. Watch on Meerkat Explains.
THE BURROW
Quick vote. A judge says xAI's power plant needed a permit. What should happen to its turbines while the case runs?
A judge says xAI's power plant needed a permit. What should happen to its turbines while the case runs?
Trivia. Musk's supercomputer shares its name with a 1944 British codebreaking machine at Bletchley Park. Whose secret messages was the original Colossus built to crack? Answer's at the bottom of the email. No peeking.
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Election day tomorrow. OpenAI would settle for a few more votes from its investors.
For anyone who thinks the cloud is just weather. Forward them this.
Meerkat is not a financial adviser, and nothing here is advice. Meerkat is a small animal with a whiteboard and a trailer that definitely counts as a car. Please do not sue Meerkat.
TRIVIA ANSWER
The German high command's. Colossus read messages scrambled by the Lorenz cipher machine, which Hitler's generals used for their most important orders.