Meta in talks to lease $10bn of compute to Anthropic

TL;DR:

• Meta is in early talks to lease computing power to Anthropic in a deal worth up to $10 billion over two years, paid in monthly increments with early exit available to both sides.
• Anthropic proposed the arrangement in June; talks are complicated by Meta having no existing business selling compute.
• The discussions may not produce a deal, and Meta shares closed down more than 2% amid a wider tech selloff on the day of the report.

Two things are unusual here. The first is a frontier lab renting capacity from a company that competes with it directly. The second is Meta contemplating a revenue line — infrastructure — that it has never operated, which is reportedly what has made the negotiation difficult rather than the price.

For Meta the logic is diversification beyond advertising, putting it in competition with neocloud providers such as CoreWeave and Nebius. Mark Zuckerberg told shareholders in May that entering cloud computing was “definitely on the table”, noting firms approached the company “almost every week” wanting access to its models or spare capacity. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Meta was already building a cloud business to sell excess compute and host third-party models.

Renting from anyone who has it

Anthropic has form here. In May it struck a deal with SpaceX to use the full capacity of the Colossus 1 data centre in Memphis. A pattern of leasing from whoever has spare silicon — a rocket company, a social network — suggests capacity constraints are binding hard enough to override competitive discomfort.

Why UK businesses should care

This is a US story with a direct UK implication. Any British organisation planning around a specific model provider is implicitly planning around that provider’s compute supply, which these deals show can rest on short-term arrangements with rivals, terminable early by either party. Vendor concentration risk in AI is not only about which model you use; it is about who owns the hardware underneath it — a question with weight for UK firms that were recently locked out of Anthropic’s Mythos.

Looking forward

The talks are early and may fail. Meta did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment and Anthropic declined. What the report establishes regardless is that compute is scarce enough, and Anthropic’s IPO-track growth demanding enough, that a $10 billion two-year lease from a competitor counts as a reasonable option.