Anthropic may rent Meta compute for up to $10 billion

Meta is in talks to lease computing power to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years. The talks were reported by The New York Times, which says Anthropic put the proposal forward in June and that the two sides remain at an early stage.

At a glance

• Under the arrangement, which Anthropic proposed in June, Anthropic would rent capacity from Meta's infrastructure, paying in monthly increments across the two-year term, according to The New York Times.
• Either company would be able to exit before the two years are up, the Times reports, and the $10 billion figure is an upper bound on a deal that has not been signed.
• Meta would move from consuming computing capacity to selling it, while Anthropic, which builds competing models, would become a paying customer of one of its rivals.

The arrangement would invert the usual roles in the AI compute market: Meta has built infrastructure to train its own models, and a lease of this size would turn part of that buildout into revenue from a direct competitor. For Anthropic it reads as another route around the capacity constraint that shapes model training schedules, one that would widen the set of suppliers available to it.

According to The New York Times, Anthropic proposed the deal in June and would pay Meta in monthly increments across the two-year period. Both companies would be able to opt out of any agreement early, the newspaper reports, so the full $10 billion would only be reached if the lease ran its whole term.

The talks are at an early stage and may not result in an agreement. They were first disclosed on July 17, and the $10 billion figure describes the maximum value of a two-year lease rather than a payment either company has committed to.

Meta and Anthropic compete directly in frontier models: Meta develops the Llama family and Anthropic sells access to its Claude models through an API and consumer apps. A lease would place Anthropic as a paying tenant on infrastructure that Meta built for its own model work.

What the two-year term leaves open

No agreement has been signed, and the talks may not produce one. The amount of capacity involved, the facilities that would host it and the start date of any lease have not been reported, and the opt-out described by The New York Times means even a signed lease could end before the two years are up.