Anthropic Agrees $3.4 Billion Deal for 1.7GW of Gas Generators to Power Data Centres

The deal was signed in late September with OnePWR Solutions, a power supplier based in San Antonio, Texas, according to the FT. OnePWR had ordered the generators from Caterpillar about two years earlier but did not have the money to complete the purchase. Anthropic first planned to buy electricity from OnePWR. Instead it took over the equipment orders, together with the engineering and construction capability needed to install the machines. Anthropic did not acquire OnePWR and no OnePWR employees moved to Anthropic, the FT reported. Both companies declined to comment, and neither responded immediately to a follow-up request from Bloomberg.

For Anthropic, the purchase is a way around one of the tightest constraints on AI expansion. Data centre developers in the United States are competing with utilities for the same generating equipment, and new grid connections in many markets take years to arrive. By stepping into orders placed two years ago, Anthropic secured equipment that a buyer joining the queue today would wait much longer for. At 1.7GW, the capacity is larger than the output of a typical large nuclear reactor.

The deal also takes Anthropic further into owning the physical infrastructure behind its models. The company has relied mainly on cloud providers, chiefly Amazon and Google, for the computing power used to train and run Claude. Buying generators outright, rather than buying the electricity they produce, puts more of the capital cost and the operating risk of power supply on Anthropic's own balance sheet.

It is not known where the generators will be installed, according to the FT.

Other AI companies have also turned to gas to bring capacity online quickly while waiting for grid connections, and the approach has drawn opposition. Elon Musk's xAI faces a lawsuit over the gas turbines it runs at its data centre site in Memphis, Tennessee.

The agreement comes as Anthropic prepares for a stock market listing. Its amended IPO filing last week showed about $895 billion in commitments, almost all of them for computing power and infrastructure, according to reports on the filing. A $3.4 billion equipment purchase is small against that total, but it is a different kind of commitment: a direct investment in hardware rather than a contract to rent capacity from someone else.

The main open questions are where the 1.7GW will run, when Caterpillar will deliver the generators, and whether Anthropic will describe the purchase in further disclosures before its shares begin trading.