Anthropic Is in Talks to Buy $10 Billion of Compute From Meta - Its Fourth Major Infrastructure Source
Anthropic proposed the arrangement in June - if Meta agrees, it would be buying from a direct model competitor for the first time.
Anthropic is in early talks with Meta to lease computing power in a deal worth up to $10 billion over two years, the New York Times reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. Anthropic proposed the arrangement in June. Talks are preliminary. Any Anthropic compute deal that closes would be one of the company's largest infrastructure agreements - and Meta's first named compute sale to an outside AI lab at anything near this scale.
Meta Compute Is the Business Behind the Proposed Deal
Meta Compute is the business behind the proposed deal. Mark Zuckerberg announced it earlier this month to sell unused data center capacity to AI companies, as a way to offset the $145 billion in capital expenditure Meta has committed to building out in 2026. A $10 billion Anthropic compute deal would be Meta Compute's highest-profile customer announcement since the initiative launched - and immediate justification for some of that spending.
For Anthropic, the Deal Is About Capacity - Not Cloud Strategy
For Anthropic, the appeal is capacity. Training and serving Claude at scale requires hundreds of thousands of accelerators running continuously, and subscriber demand keeps climbing. Anthropic already pays xAI $1.25 billion per month to use the Colossus supercomputer cluster in Memphis. Google and Amazon both supply cloud access as part of their investment stakes in the company. Adding Meta would give Anthropic a fourth major supply source and more room to balance workloads across providers.
Anthropic Would Be Buying Infrastructure From a Direct Model Competitor
Meta would be the fourth. No major frontier AI lab has historically purchased infrastructure from a company whose models compete directly with its own - Meta's Llama series and Claude both target enterprise developer workloads, and Meta's Muse models compete with Claude on multimodal and coding tasks. An Anthropic compute deal with Meta also introduces a supply chain dependency on a company that has every incentive to prioritize its own AI products when GPU capacity runs short.
Both companies declined to comment to the Times. Talks are early. Meta has set no timeline or structure for the arrangement. Zuckerberg faces analyst questions about the $145 billion capex plan on earnings calls - a signed Anthropic contract worth $5 billion per year would be among the largest cloud deals announced in 2026, and a credible first proof that Meta Compute can attract frontier AI labs as paying customers.