Anthropic PBC is reportedly seeking to lease some of Meta Platforms Inc.’s data center capacity.
The New York Times today cited three sources as saying that the deal could be worth $10 billion over two years. However, the report noted that the companies’ discussions are at an early stage and could fall through.
The idea of a data center lease was reportedly floated by Anthropic in June. According to the Times, the company is seeking terms that would give it the option to cancel the contract early.
The artificial intelligence developer added a similar clause to its recently signed infrastructure deal with SpaceX Corp. Anthropic will pay $1.25 billion per month to use the rocket maker’s Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 supercomputers. The contract is structured as a 180-day lease, but both companies can end it early with a 90-day notice.
Shortly after signing the SpaceX deal, Anthropic raised the rate limits of its application programming interface and Claude Code. A contract with Meta could be followed by a similar increase. However, any rate limit boost would likely be smaller given that lease is worth $416 million per month, or a third of what Anthropic is paying SpaceX.
Today’s report didn’t specify what Meta hardware the AI developer hopes to use. Some of the Facebook parent’s servers contain Nvidia Corp. chips while others use the MTIA 400, a custom accelerator that debuted in March. Anthropic is more likely to pick the former option. Its workloads are already compatible with Nvidia chips and adapting AI workloads to Meta’s silicon would involve a significant amount of work.
Leasing AI chips to other companies could help Meta recoup some of its heavy infrastructure spending. This week, the Facebook parent committed more than $50 billion to a data center campus in Louisiana. The sprawling development spans 3,650 acres and will be supported by 10 power plants.
Meta faces heavy competition in the AI infrastructure market. Buyers can choose among the offerings of not only the industry’s top cloud providers and SpaceX but also numerous well-funded data center startups. In theory, signing up a high-profile customer such as Anthropic could make it easier for Meta to stand out.
The companies’ lease discussions are particularly notable because they compete with each other in the large language model market. Last week, Meta debuted an LLM called Muse Spark 1.1 that is optimized for programming tasks. The company plans to sell access to the model through an API that will cost 75% less than Claude.
Photo: Meta Platforms
Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.
- 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more
- 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network.
About SiliconANGLE Media
Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.
