Anthropic in early talks to lease $10 billion in compute from Meta, rival cloud provider

Anthropic is in very early discussions to lease computing power from Meta in a deal worth about $10 billion, the New York Times reported on Friday, with CNBC confirming the talks. The arrangement would make Meta a cloud provider to one of its biggest AI rivals, Anthropic, which develops the Claude model family.

Meta could spend as much as $145 billion on capital expenditure in 2026, much of it on AI infrastructure, and has been signaling plans to monetize excess capacity. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in May that the company was considering entering the cloud business, and a former senior AWS executive, Dave Brown, is set to join Meta.

Compute shortage drives unusual partnerships

Access to AI chips remains a critical bottleneck for companies like Anthropic, which places usage limits on its most advanced models such as Fable. The talks with Meta come just weeks after Anthropic announced a $1.25 billion per month arrangement with SpaceX to use the Colossus 1 data center’s Nvidia GPUs. Google is also renting GPUs from SpaceX for $920 million per month and is rationing Gemini access to Meta because it cannot serve demand.

• Anthropic is approaching a $1 trillion valuation but cannot build compute capacity fast enough to meet demand for Claude.
• Meta cut 8,000 jobs in May while redirecting billions toward AI infrastructure.
• SpaceX already sells GPU capacity to both Anthropic and Google, blurring competitive lines.
• Google sells Gemini to Meta while rationing its access, highlighting the industry's cross-supply dynamics.
• The deal would be a significant step in Meta's cloud business, justifying its massive infrastructure spending to investors.

Unusual competitive dynamics

Anthropic and Meta are direct competitors in AI: Meta develops its own Llama models, while Anthropic builds Claude. But the compute shortage has made such cross-company leasing arrangements routine. The AI industry's competitive lines are blurring because everyone needs more compute than they can build alone, leading to unusual partnerships between rivals. For Meta, selling excess compute to Anthropic would help justify its $145 billion capex to investors and mark the beginning of a cloud computing business. The talks are still preliminary, and no deal has been finalized. If completed, the arrangement would be one of the largest compute leasing deals in the industry, further reshaping the AI infrastructure landscape.