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Anthropic Seeks to Bypass Cloud Providers: Directly Lease a 1GW Data Center
Dongcha Beating AI News Flash: The Information, citing people familiar with the matter, reports that Anthropic is in talks with Stream Data Centers to directly lease up to 1GW of data center capacity. The two sides remain in early negotiations, the final scale has not been determined, and the deal may still fall through.
If signed, Anthropic would become a direct data center tenant and deploy its own servers and chips. The equipment could include Google and Broadcom TPUs, and NVIDIA GPUs may also be used. Google is also discussing providing credit guarantees for some projects.
This differs from directly leasing servers from AWS or Google Cloud. Anthropic could control its own chips, racks, and networking equipment, avoiding one layer of cloud-provider margin, but it would also bear equipment procurement and data center operating costs. Based on an estimate by a data center developer interviewed by The Information, a complete computing infrastructure project at 1GW would require at least $40 billion in capital investment.
Anthropic has already directly leased approximately 401MW of data center capacity from TeraWulf this year, and last year announced a partnership with Fluidstack to invest $50 billion in building custom data centers. If the Stream deal reaches 1GW, it would become one of Anthropic's largest direct data center leases to date.