Anthropic is leaning harder on leased data center capacity in the U.S., and Google may end up helping underwrite the bill. That is a much more cautious play than the giant self-build plans favoured by some rivals, but it also shows how quickly demand for Claude is forcing the company to lock up more compute.
According to Reuters, citing The Information, Anthropic has already signed more than a dozen preliminary deals to rent data centers in the U.S., adding more than 1 GW of compute capacity in total. The interesting part is the financing structure: Google, which is also helping Anthropic develop its own AI chips, could serve as a guarantor for the lease payments.
A familiar AI financing trick
This kind of arrangement is not exactly new. OpenAI has become the poster child for the modern AI supply chain, where one group funds the infrastructure, another group uses it, and a third is left carrying the contractual weight if things go sideways. AI compute is expensive, scarce, and politically glamorous enough that everyone wants a piece of the action – preferably without owning the entire bill.
Anthropic has also been busy elsewhere. Earlier this month, it reached an agreement with SpaceX for a long-term lease of the Colossus 1 data center in Tennessee, although Elon Musk later said he would guarantee the capacity only for the next 180 days. The deal was initially understood to run for three years, which is a pretty wide gap for something as mundane as warehouse economics.
Google’s bigger bet on Anthropic
Alphabet said in April that it was prepared to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, so a guarantee on leased infrastructure fits the broader picture. The relationship is now looking less like a simple strategic investment and more like a full-stack support system: capital, chips, and the power to keep the models fed.
By late May, Anthropic had raised a total of $65 billion from investors and lifted its own valuation to $965 billion. It also filed for an IPO before OpenAI did, although the company has not yet disclosed the size or timing of the offering.
More Anthropic compute, less capex
The strategy makes sense if Anthropic wants to grow fast without turning into a data center builder overnight. But it also deepens the company’s dependence on heavyweight partners, which is fine until demand, financing, or a guarantor’s patience changes. For now, the race is simple: whoever secures the most usable compute gets to ship the most useful AI.