Anthropic could pay Meta as much as $10B for compute

Anthropic is in talks to lease computing power from Meta in a deal that could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years, as The New York Times reported. Anthropic proposed the arrangement in June, according to the same report.

At a glance

• Payments would arrive in monthly increments across the two-year term, and either company would be able to end the arrangement before it runs out, according to the Times.
• Reporting from July described the discussions as early stage and said they may not result in a deal, which leaves the $10 billion as a ceiling on a proposal rather than a contracted sum.
• Anthropic announced a similar deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX covering computing capacity at the Colossus 1 data center, according to CNBC, a second external supply arrangement alongside the Meta talks.

A deal at that scale would put Meta in the position of selling capacity to a rival model developer, which is not how the company has usually described its infrastructure spending. For Anthropic it reads as a move to spread compute supply across several providers rather than depend on one. The distance between a June proposal and a signed contract is the whole of the story so far.

Meta would sit on the supply side of the arrangement, leasing computing capacity to Anthropic rather than buying anything from it. Meta operates data center infrastructure built for its own model development, and the reported deal would open part of that capacity to an outside customer.

A lease of this kind covers access to running hardware for a fixed period, with the customer paying for capacity it does not own or operate. Anthropic has taken that route before: CNBC reported a similar deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX for computing capacity at the Colossus 1 data center.

Leasing capacity from another operator has become a standard route for AI developers, whose demand for accelerated computing tends to outrun what they can build on their own schedule. The Meta talks and the SpaceX deal both involve capacity from companies whose primary business is not selling cloud services.

Whether the proposal becomes a contract

No signing date has been reported, and the available reporting does not specify how much capacity the arrangement would cover or which facilities would supply it. The $10 billion remains the outer edge of a proposal that both sides could abandon. Until terms are agreed, the only described elements are the two-year horizon and the monthly payment structure reported by The New York Times.