Anthropic wants to bypass cloud providers: directly lease 1GW of data centers.

动察 Beating AI News Flash: The Information, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Anthropic is in talks with Stream Data Centers to directly lease up to 1GW of data center compute capacity. The two sides are still in early negotiations, the final scale has not been determined, and the deal could still fall through.

If signed, Anthropic would become a direct data center tenant and then deploy its own servers and chips. The equipment could include Google and Broadcom TPUs, and may also use Nvidia GPUs. Google is also discussing providing credit guarantees for some projects.

This differs from directly renting servers from AWS or Google Cloud. Anthropic could control the chips, racks, and networking equipment itself, paying one less layer of cloud provider profit, but it would also bear the costs of equipment procurement and data center operations. According to estimates from data center developers interviewed by The Information, a full set of computing infrastructure at 1GW scale would require at least $40 billion in capital investment.

Anthropic has already directly leased about 401MW of data center capacity from TeraWulf this year, and last year it also announced a partnership with Fluidstack to invest $50 billion to build custom data centers. If the Stream deal reaches 1GW, it will become one of Anthropic's largest direct data center leases to date.