Meta in Talks to Sell $10 Billion of Computing Power to Anthropic
Meta is in early talks to lease AI computing power from its data centers to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years, according to Bloomberg and the New York Times.
In Brief
- Meta is in early talks to lease AI compute from its data centers to Anthropic, worth as much as $10 billion over two years, per the New York Times.
- Both companies declined to comment; Meta has been developing plans for an AI cloud business akin to AWS Bedrock.
- Anthropic has been spending aggressively on compute, including a $45 billion, three-year deal with SpaceX and a $1.8 billion deal with Akamai.
Meta Platforms Inc. is in early discussions to lease computing power from its data centers to Anthropic PBC, according to people familiar with the matter, an opportunity for the social-media giant to build a new business around its heavy investment in AI infrastructure. The discussions are still in early stages and plans could ultimately change, said the people, who asked not to be named. The arrangement could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years, according to the New York Times, which first reported on the talks.
Spokespeople for Meta and Anthropic declined to comment. The news put Meta stock in focus, with shares that were down nearly 6% earlier in the day jumping on the report and trading down roughly 2.5% at 1:30 p.m. in New York.
If completed, the arrangement would be one of the largest AI-compute agreements on record and would turn Meta’s sprawling data-center buildout — much of it erected ahead of proven demand — into a standalone cloud business.
Why Meta is exploring an Anthropic compute lease
Meta has been developing plans for a cloud computing business, including the possibility of leasing computing capacity to other companies, Bloomberg reported earlier this month. It is also considering selling access to AI models that are hosted on its infrastructure, a business akin to Amazon Web Services’ Bedrock offering. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg that Meta is currently using all of its computing capacity for internal projects, but that lucrative offers have made him consider renting it instead. “The offers that you get for using the compute are so high that it may make sense, in some cases, to rent out or consider those kind of deals instead of your own internal uses,” Zuckerberg said.
The logic is structural. Building frontier models requires vast, contiguous compute that even well-funded labs struggle to secure, so a sitting owner of that hardware becomes a strategic supplier almost by accident of its own spending. For Meta, a marquee lease would reframe its AI capital expenditure as an asset with a clear customer rather than a cost center.
The timing matters because demand for frontier compute still outstrips supply: Anthropic alone has been signing multi-billion-dollar capacity deals, making Meta’s idle clusters a strategically scarce resource rather than a sunk cost.
What it means for Meta stock and the compute market
Anthropic, meanwhile, has been spending aggressively to secure computing capacity from other tech companies. It announced a deal in May to pay Elon Musk’s SpaceX nearly $45 billion over the next three years for computing power from multiple data-center sites. That same month it signed a separate $1.8 billion computing deal with cloud-services provider Akamai Technologies Inc. A sitting owner of frontier-class hardware leasing to one of the few labs that can absorb that scale turns idle clusters into a potential revenue stream.
For Meta, the deal also hedges its own AI bets: if consumer AI uptake disappoints, the infrastructure still pays for itself by serving Anthropic, softening the criticism that the company overspent on data centers.
Investors have debated whether Meta’s capital spending on AI was justified; a lease to Anthropic reframes that spend as revenue-generating, a potentially constructive signal for the shares.
Meta is in talks to lease about $10 billion of AI compute to Anthropic over two years, a deal that would create a new cloud business, according to Bloomberg reporting by Kurt Wagner and Shirin Ghaffary, aggregating the New York Times.
FAQ
What is the Meta–Anthropic deal?
Meta is in early talks to lease AI computing power to Anthropic in a deal worth as much as $10 billion over two years, according to the New York Times, which first reported it.
Why would Meta sell compute?
Meta has been developing an AI cloud business and, per Zuckerberg, has received offers for its compute high enough to make renting it out worth considering.
What does it mean for Meta stock?
Meta shares jumped on the news, with investors viewing a lease to Anthropic as a way to monetize AI infrastructure spending.
