Anthropic and Meta discuss reported $10 billion compute lease

Anthropic is in early talks to lease data center capacity from Meta Platforms in a deal that could be worth $10 billion over two years, according to The New York Times, which cited three people familiar with the discussions. No agreement has been announced, and the talks could still collapse.

The reported deal would be notable because Meta and Anthropic compete directly in large language models, yet the economics of AI infrastructure are pushing even rivals into capacity-sharing arrangements. The Times reported that Anthropic raised the leasing idea in June and is seeking contract language that would let it exit early.

At the reported value, the lease would work out to roughly $416 million a month. That is large by normal cloud spending standards, but smaller than Anthropic’s separate compute agreement with SpaceX, under which Anthropic will pay $1.25 billion a month to use the Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 supercomputers.

Anthropic’s SpaceX contract is structured as a 180-day lease, with either side able to terminate it early on 90 days’ notice. The reported request for a similar escape clause in the Meta talks suggests Anthropic is trying to secure capacity without locking itself into every long-term infrastructure bet at peak AI demand.

What Meta may be selling

The Times report did not identify which Meta systems Anthropic would use if the companies reach a deal. Meta operates servers equipped with Nvidia chips and has also developed its own accelerator, the MTIA 400, which debuted in March.

Anthropic’s workloads are already built for Nvidia hardware, making that the more straightforward option. Moving workloads onto Meta’s custom silicon would require additional engineering work, and no such plan has been disclosed.

For Anthropic, more leased capacity could support higher usage limits for its products. After signing the SpaceX compute agreement, the company increased rate limits for its API and Claude Code. A Meta lease could create room for another increase, although the reported monthly spend would be about one-third of the SpaceX commitment.

Meta’s infrastructure spend needs customers

For Meta, renting compute to Anthropic would help offset a capital-intensive AI buildout. Meta this week committed more than $50 billion to a data center campus in Louisiana, a 3,650-acre project expected to be supported by 10 power plants.

That scale puts pressure on Meta to find more ways to monetize infrastructure beyond its own consumer products and AI model work. A deal with Anthropic would give Meta a high-profile customer in a crowded compute market that includes the major cloud providers, SpaceX and a growing set of well-funded AI data center startups.

The competitive tension is explicit. Meta last week introduced Muse Spark 1.1, a large language model aimed at coding tasks. The company plans to offer the model through an API priced 75% below Claude, according to a report cited by SiliconANGLE.

A lease would not change that rivalry. It would show that scarce AI compute can make unusual counterparties out of model companies, infrastructure owners and platform vendors. The unanswered questions are the hardware mix, cancellation terms and whether Meta can turn its internal AI buildout into an external infrastructure business at meaningful scale.

This story draws on original reporting from SiliconANGLE.