Anthropic is in preliminary discussions to secure a lease of $10 billion in computing resources from Meta.
Anthropic is reportedly in initial discussions to lease computing power from Meta in a potential $10 billion deal, according to the New York Times. CNBC also confirmed these early talks. This development follows Anthropic's recent announcement of a $1.25 billion-per-month agreement with SpaceX for access to Nvidia GPUs at the Colossus 1 data center.
This prospective deal highlights Anthropic's struggle to scale its compute capacity quickly enough to satisfy the demand for its AI model, Claude, despite nearing a $1 trillion valuation. Access to AI chips remains a significant hurdle, and the company has to impose usage limits on its most advanced models. Similarly, Google is leasing GPUs from SpaceX for $920 million each month and is currently rationing access to its Gemini model for Meta due to overwhelming demand.
For Meta, a partnership with Anthropic would kickstart the cloud computing venture that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hinted at. In May, Zuckerberg indicated that Meta was contemplating a move into cloud services, and in October of the previous year, he mentioned that companies frequently inquire about purchasing computing resources from Meta at a premium. Meta anticipates capital expenditures as high as $145 billion by 2026. Moreover, former senior AWS executive Dave Brown is set to join Meta. The company, which laid off 8,000 employees in May, is redirecting substantial funds towards AI infrastructure. Selling excess computing capacity to Anthropic would provide justification for that expenditure in the eyes of investors.
This arrangement would create a unique situation: while Meta develops its own Llama models and competes with Claude, it would also serve as Anthropic's infrastructure provider. The ongoing compute shortage has made such partnerships more common; for instance, SpaceX supplies GPUs to both Anthropic and Google, while Google sells its Gemini model to Meta but limits access. The competitive boundaries within the AI industry are increasingly blurred as all players grapple with a greater demand for computing resources than they can independently produce.
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Anthropic is in preliminary discussions to secure a lease of $10 billion in computing resources from Meta.
The agreement would come after Anthropic's $1.25B monthly arrangement with SpaceX for Colossus. Meanwhile, Meta is developing a cloud business to capitalize on $145B invested in AI infrastructure.
