Anthropic is negotiating to directly lease up to 1GW data center

According to The Information, citing informed sources, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic is in talks with data center operator Stream Data Centers to directly lease up to 1GW of data center computing power. The two parties are still in early negotiations, and the final scale has not yet been determined, with the deal possibly not being finalized.

If signed, Anthropic will directly become a tenant of the data center and deploy its own servers and chips. The related equipment may include TPUs from Google and Broadcom, and may also use NVIDIA GPUs. Google is also discussing providing credit guarantees for some projects. This is different from renting servers from AWS or Google Cloud, as Anthropic can control the chips, racks, and network equipment itself, paying less in cloud vendor profits but needing to bear the costs of equipment procurement and data center operations.

Data center developers interviewed by The Information estimate that a complete computing infrastructure of 1GW scale requires at least $40 billion in capital investment. Anthropic has already directly leased approximately 401MW of data center from TeraWulf this year and announced a partnership with Fluidstack last year to invest $50 billion in building a custom data center. If the deal with Stream reaches 1GW, it will become one of Anthropic's largest direct data center leases to date.