AI Firm Anthropic To Spend $50B Building U.S. Data Centers
Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind virtual assistant Claude, is diving into the world of data center development.
The San Francisco-based company plans to spend $50B to build out AI infrastructure in the U.S., beginning in Texas and New York and then expanding to other locations, it announced Wednesday. Anthropic says it is the first time it is building its own data centers rather than relying on third-party providers.
Anthropic is partnering on the endeavor with Fluidstack, a UK-based neocloud startup.
Anthropic didn’t say where the $50B for the project is coming from or how much of it might be funded with debt. The company closed in September on $13B in funding through a Series F round that took its valuation to $183B.
In its release, Anthropic said the $50B investment is “necessary to meet the growing demand for Claude from hundreds of thousands of businesses while keeping our research at the frontier.”
Claude, which it released in 2023, has more than 300,000 business customers, the company said.
It also said the investment is expected to create 800 permanent jobs and 2,400 construction jobs, and the sites are expected to come online next year.
“We’re getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren’t possible before,” Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei said in the company’s statement. “Realizing that potential requires infrastructure that can support continued development at the frontier. These sites will help us build more capable AI systems that can drive those breakthroughs, while creating American jobs.”
Fluidstack, Anthropic's partner in the build-out, is a small player in the data center world. But it recently shot into the limelight, inking a deal with the French government to build an $11B “AI Factory,” one of the largest such developments in Europe.
The $50B investment announced Wednesday is the latest in a series of similar infusions of tens of billions of dollars into the data center space amid the AI arms race.
Capital expenditures from the four major hyperscalers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta — totaled $113.4B last quarter, up more than 18% from the prior quarter and 73% from the same period last year. OpenAI, the ChatGPT creator to which Anthropic is seen as a competitor, is also spending hundreds of billions of dollars building out data centers through its Stargate venture.
