Meta spent years building data centers strictly for its own use. Now, according to The New York Times, it might start renting some of that capacity out, and Anthropic could be the first customer.
The two companies are reportedly in early talks over a two-year agreement worth up to $10 billion, which would give Anthropic access to Meta’s computing infrastructure in exchange for monthly payments. Neither side has confirmed the negotiations publicly, and the reported figure represents a ceiling rather than a locked-in number. Both companies would apparently retain the option to walk away early if the deal moves forward.
For Anthropic, this would be another addition to an already sprawling infrastructure portfolio. The company already runs Claude across AWS Trainium chips, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs, and has locked in massive commitments elsewhere: roughly $1.25 billion a month to SpaceX through 2029 for its Colossus computing infrastructure, plus a 20-year data center lease with TeraWulf expected to generate about $19 billion over its initial term. A Meta deal would extend that diversification even further, though it’s still unclear whether Meta would offer the kind of deep technical integration Anthropic gets from AWS’s Annapurna Labs team.
For Meta, the more interesting story is what this signals about its own ambitions. The company projects capital expenditure between $125 billion and $145 billion in 2026, up sharply from about $72 billion the year before, with most of that money heading toward data centers and AI infrastructure. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in May that companies regularly approach Meta about buying compute capacity, and that the company was actively weighing whether to enter the cloud market.
Still, what analysts are discussing here looks nothing like a full cloud platform. There’s no indication Meta would offer the storage, databases, security tools, or billing infrastructure that companies like AWS or Google Cloud bundle together. Reports suggest Meta has organized part of this effort internally under something called Meta Compute, though nothing public has launched under that name. The company has also brought on longtime AWS executive Dave Brown to help lead its data center expansion.
If the deal closes, it would put Meta in an unusual position: buying capacity from providers like CoreWeave while simultaneously renting out its own infrastructure to a competitor in the AI space, without becoming a full hyperscale cloud provider itself.
