Anthropic plans to double AI computing power, NYT says

Anthropic expects to have more than 3.5 gigawatts of computing power by the end of 2026, and it wants to double that next year, The New York Times reported on Monday, Nov. 2, citing two people with knowledge of its plans. That is about enough electricity to power every home in Chicago. The maker of Claude has signed dozens of contracts with former cryptocurrency miners, data center startups, chipmakers and tech giants to get there, according to the Times.nytimes.com+1

The push comes weeks before what could be one of the largest IPOs on record. Anthropic filed its S-1 on Oct. 26 to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market ↘ 1.52% under the ticker "ANT". Trading could begin as soon as Nov. 16.anthropic.com+1

Nearly $900 billion in commitments

Anthropic has committed $895.4 billion through 2045 to computing and chip deals, and it largely cannot back out of them, the Times reported, citing the company's prospectus. Nearly $70 billion of that is expected to take effect over the next 12 months. The commitments through 2036 include $121.3 billion with Google Alphabet Inc. ↗ 0.08%, $120.5 billion with SpaceX, $110 billion with Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. ↗ 2.06% and $44.9 billion with Microsoft ↗ 2.74%.investing.com+1

Anthropic has also turned to "neoclouds," companies that rent out computing power. These include a $50 billion deal with Fluidstack and a $41.3 billion deal with Lambda. Former crypto miners TeraWulf ↗ 14.53% and Hut 8 ↗ 15.90% are building data centers for the company. The Times said these firms already have land and power, so they can bring capacity online faster than Amazon or Microsoft, which have a backlog of demand.

To speed things up, Anthropic is buying chips directly from Nvidia ↗ 2.29%, AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. ↗ 3.65% and Broadcom ↗ 3.07%. It is also buying cooling systems and hiring construction and supply-chain experts. It is now willing to use sites as small as 50 megawatts, backed by batteries and natural gas.indianexpress.com

Financing the buildout

The spending is pushing Anthropic toward the public markets. On Oct. 26, Bank of America ↗ 0.18%, Blackstone ↘ 1.62%, Citi Citigroup Inc. ↘ 0.32% and Morgan Stanley ↗ 0.19% agreed to provide $63 billion to buy Broadcom chips and networking gear, which will be leased to Anthropic. Deliveries are set to begin in 2027. The company has warned that it may need more funding sooner than expected.charlotteobserver.com+1

The effort has hit some practical limits. TeraWulf is building a site for Anthropic in upstate New York, and it had to compete for electricians with the Buffalo Bills' stadium project, CEO Paul Prager told the Times. Anthropic chief compute officer Tom Brown said in September that computing is "very clearly the bottleneck for all of our progress." In its prospectus, the company wrote that staying at the frontier is "substantially dependent on our ability to secure compute at the scale required".indianexpress.com