Future in motion: Inside Anthropic's hunt for AI computing power

Sri Muppidi & Kalley Huang

Late last year, Anthropic’s executives were in a bind. Their company, which was growing like a weed, was running out of computing power for artificial intelligence.

The amount of computing power that was needed became a “cone of uncertainty,” Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, said at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in December. “Because the cone is so wide,” he added, “it’s hard to avoid making a mistake.”

The realisation sent Anthropic on an all-out effort to obtain more computing power. In the ensuing months, the San Francisco company embarked on a deal spree, according to 14 people with knowledge of the AI lab, investors and industry experts.

Anthropic has since signed dozens of contracts with former cryptocurrency miners, data centre startups, chipmakers and tech giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and SpaceX to secure enough computing power. It hired experts in data centres, which are the enormous computing sites powering AI, and bought data centre equipment to speed up construction. It met with developers and explored converting old coal plants and factories into data centres.

“Anthropic is gobbling up a lot of the capacity,” said Erik Bernhardsson, the CEO of Modal, a New York company that sells computing power.

Anthropic’s pursuit of computing power, some details of which have not been previously reported, is critical as it tries to lead in AI and conduct what could be the largest-ever initial public offering this month. The company needs computing power to develop cutting-edge AI models and to deliver products, like the Claude chatbot, to businesses and consumers.

“Our ability to remain at the frontier of AI capabilities is substantially dependent on our ability to secure compute at the scale required to sustain all our workloads,” the company wrote.

In total, Anthropic has committed a whopping $895.4 billion through 2045 to computing power and chip deals that it largely cannot back out of, according to its prospectus. This year, it is expected to have more than 3.5 gigawatts of computing power, or enough electricity to power all the homes in Chicago. Next year, it aims to double that amount.

But its voracious demands are expensive, intensifying Anthropic’s need to go public in an offering that could raise $100 billion. It is also raising debt financing, including $63 billion last week, from Wall Street banks and private credit firms. Even so, Anthropic has warned that it may need to seek additional financing sooner than anticipated.

While other AI companies also need computing power, giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta have deep pockets and credit histories for buying chips and building data centres. Younger companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have to rely on others for computing power.

Anthropic declined to comment on the record before its IPO.

After Anthropic was founded in 2021, it turned to Amazon and Google, which agreed to invest a combined $6 billion in the startup in 2023, for computing power. The company then spent much of that money on Amazon’s and Google’s cloud computing services.

Tom Brown, Anthropic’s chief compute officer, spearheaded both deals, two people with knowledge of the company said. He also led efforts to diversify beyond Nvidia’s AI chips and use chips from Amazon, Google and Advanced Micro Devices, for more options.

Finding enough computing power is “very clearly the bottleneck for all of our progress,” Brown said at a Group of 20 event in September. “We’re in a huge shortage of the power and labour needed to support the demand for AI,” he said.

Last year, Anthropic’s AI coding tool, Claude Code, became a hit. But as it became popular, the company lacked computing power to meet demand and had to limit free use of its products and raise prices for some of them.

So Anthropic embarked on its deal spree. It has committed $121.3 billion to computing power from Google, $110 billion with Amazon, $44.9 billion with Microsoft and $120.5 billion with SpaceX through 2036, according to its prospectus.

Anthropic also started working with “neoclouds,” companies that provide computing power, including a $50 billion deal with one called Fluidstack and a $41.3 billion deal with another, Lambda. Unlike Amazon and Microsoft, which are backlogged with demand for their computing power, neoclouds and former crypto miners have access to land and power for data centres and can bring computing power online sooner.

The New York Times