Anthropic Lines Up $50B Data Center Spree

Anthropic is diving deeper into the data center development game.

The company has laid out a $50 billion plan to build its own AI campuses across the United States, Bloomberg reported. The move underscores how quickly tech giants are swallowing land and power in pursuit of computational heft.

The OpenAI rival detailed the build-out this week; the first sites are expected to come online next year. Unlike its past reliance on cloud titans Amazon and Google, Anthropic is taking the lead on this round of infrastructure, partnering with U.K.-based “neocloud” startup Fluidstack to deliver gigawatts of capacity.

Anthropic framed the spending as aligned with the Trump administration’s pitch for “American AI leadership,” and it comes with the usual jobs pledge: roughly 2,400 construction roles and 800 permanent positions across future campuses in markets including Texas and New York.

CEO Dario Amodei cast the expansion as table stakes for accelerating scientific breakthroughs and building “more capable AI systems.”

The plan vaults Anthropic into the same arena as its larger competitors, all of which are racing to secure land, power and political goodwill.

Earlier this year, OpenAI floated a $500 billion U.S. data center program known as Stargate before expanding it abroad. Meta, meanwhile, is pushing a 2-gigawatt Louisiana facility and recently telegraphed plans to deploy $600 billion in domestic infrastructure over the next several years.

Google, Microsoft and Nvidia are running similar plays, stirring investor questions about whether the industry is scaling faster than its revenue models can justify.

Those doubts haven’t slowed the capital pouring into AI development. Anthropic — founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staffers — raised $13 billion this year at a $183 billion valuation and now counts about 300,000 business users of its Claude model.

Two months ago, the company leased several floors of office space at the Foundry Square III building in downtown San Francisco, totaling 100,000 square feet. Anthropic had already subleased more than 230,000 square feet across the street from Slack.

— Holden Walter-Warner