4 November 2026 · Insights

Market pulse, November 2026

Headline insights on compute supply, pricing, data centers and financing.

New capacity is getting harder to deliver. States are restricting data-center permits and pricing access to the grid, and state policy is the one to watch after the 3 November elections. Token prices keep falling, but buyers pay per task, not per token. Where capacity sits, whether its permits are in hand and what a contract commits you to now matter as much as the rate.

  1. Texas data-center permits stay on hold until ERCOT finishes its audit; its report is due by 10 December 2026.Source: Governor of Texas, 3 Aug and 21 Sep 2026; ERCOT Board, 14–15 Sep 2026.
  2. Buying compute late is costly, even for a frontier lab. Anthropic says short-term compute "currently costs significantly more" than multi-year commitments; $5.0 billion of it was one of two main causes of its third-quarter operating loss.Source: Anthropic, PBC, Form S-1/A-1, 2 Nov 2026, p.132–133.
  3. Cloud compute is being bought on long contracts. Amazon reports $578 billion of commitments on customer contracts longer than a year, "primarily related to AWS", with a weighted-average remaining life of 6.1 years.Source: Amazon Form 10-Q, Q3 2026, p.9–10.
  4. Nebius raised GPU list prices on 1 October: H100 on-demand from $3.85 to $4.50 per GPU-hour (eu-north1), B200 from $7.15 to $8.50 (us-central1).Source: Nebius pricing documentation, read 3 Nov 2026.
  5. Anthropic keeps cutting token prices, but still prices by the token, not the task. Opus 5.5 is 20% below Opus 5 (60% on cache hits). Haiku 5.5 is up to 90% cheaper per token, yet Anthropic says it costs about 75% less to run, because its new tokenizer uses more tokens per task.Source: Anthropic pricing documentation and Haiku 5.5 launch page, 7–8 Oct 2026.
  6. Oregon has paused new data-center air and water permits until 1 July 2027.Source: Governor of Oregon, letter to DEQ, 9 Oct 2026.
  7. Texas now prices a place in the grid queue: large new loads post $50,000 per megawatt in security before an ERCOT interconnection study.Source: Public Utility Commission of Texas, Project 58481, order of 18 Sep 2026.

Spruce Street's tools run on Anthropic's models.