Anthropic to invest $50 billion in new US data centres, working with UK’s Fluidstack amid AI push

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic announced a $50 billion (€43.3 billion) investment in computing infrastructure on Wednesday.

Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, said it is working with London-based Fluidstack to build the new computing facilities to power its AI systems, including new data centres in Texas and New York.

It didn't disclose their exact locations or what source of electricity they will need.

A report last month from TD Cowen said that the leading cloud computing providers leased a “staggering” amount of US data centre capacity in the third fiscal quarter of this year, amounting to more than 7.4 gigawatts of energy, more than all of last year combined.

Oracle was securing the most capacity during that time, much of it supporting AI workloads for Anthropic's chief rival OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT. Google was second and Fluidstack came in third, ahead of Meta, Amazon, CoreWeave, and Microsoft.

Anthropic said in a statement that the “scale of this investment is necessary to meet the growing demand for Claude from hundreds of thousands of businesses while keeping our research at the frontier”.

The tech industry's huge amount of spending on computing infrastructure for AI startups that aren't yet profitable has fueled concerns about an AI investment bubble.

Investors have closely watched a series of intertwined deals over recent months between top AI developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as the companies building the costly computer chips and data centres needed to power their AI products.

Anthropic said it will continue to “prioritise cost-effective, capital-efficient approaches” to scaling up its business.