Anthropic in early talks to lease Meta compute in $10 million deal

Anthropic has asked to lease AI computing power from Meta in an arrangement that could reach $10 billion over two years, the New York Times reported on Friday, a sign that the Claude maker still cannot secure enough chips to keep up with compute demand.

The Times, citing people familiar with the matter, said Anthropic forwarded the proposal to Meta in June and that Meta is still thinking about it.

The talks are still considered preliminary, and either side could pull out of the agreement before the two years are up. If a deal does get signed, Anthropic is expected to pay Meta on a monthly basis.

This deal will trail the contract Anthropic struck in May with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, committing Anthropic to $45 billion over three years at about $1.25 billion a month for access to Nvidia GPUs at the Colossus 1 data center.

Anthropic signing more AI compute deals

Anthropic is closing in on a $1 trillion valuation yet still cannot build computing capacity fast enough to serve Claude. Nvidia’s processors remain the bottleneck for AI developers, and Anthropic has gone ahead to cap how heavily users can use its most advanced models.

The current situation has pushed Anthropic to find computational capacity from wherever it can be acquired, even if temporarily and at a cost.

The scramble for compute to serve AI platforms does not stop with Anthropic. Google is also paying SpaceX about $920 million a month for GPUs, and has started to ration access to its Gemini model, with even Meta being on the receiving end.

Leasing compute opens new business line for Meta

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in May that the company was looking at making forays into cloud computing, stating it was a way to show investors that its AI outlays can earn revenue beyond improving Meta’s own products.

In October last year, he also said that other companies regularly asked if they could buy compute from Meta at a premium.

Meta could spend as much as $145 billion in capital expenditure in 2026, with most of it going to AI infrastructure. This figure is more than double the $72 billion it spent the year before.

The company also cut 8,000 jobs in May while steering money toward the AI investment. Selling surplus capacity to Anthropic would give CEO Mark Zuckerberg a concrete answer when shareholders ask what the money spent has been used for.

It is also worth noting that Meta builds its own Llama models and competes directly with Claude, so a deal would make the tech giant both rival and landlord to Anthropic.