Anthropic Aims to Double Computing Capacity to About 7 Gigawatts Next Year, NYT Reports

According to the report, the company expects to have more than 3.5 gigawatts of capacity in place by the end of this year. The 2027 target would need enough electricity to power every home in Chicago, the report said. Anthropic has not publicly confirmed the figure, and it should be treated as a press report until the company does.

The target fits with what Anthropic has already disclosed to investors. Its updated IPO prospectus shows $895.4 billion in commitments for data centres, chips and computing power running through 2045, according to Investing.com. Close to $70 billion of those commitments are expected to take effect in the next 12 months.

Who Supplies the Compute

The largest disclosed commitments are with Google at $121.3 billion, SpaceX at $120.5 billion, Amazon at $110 billion and Microsoft at $44.9 billion, according to the report. Anthropic also buys capacity from neocloud providers, which rent GPU computing as a service, including Fluidstack, Lambda and Nscale.

The company is also getting more involved in building its own infrastructure. It is hiring construction and supply-chain specialists and buying equipment such as cooling systems for data centre projects, the report said. Until now it has mostly relied on its cloud partners to handle construction.

Why It Matters

The report comes as investors weigh both how big Anthropic's IPO could be and how much the company has to spend. Earlier on Tuesday, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said Anthropic's likely sub-investment-grade credit rating could push its listing valuation below $1.5 trillion. Investors have been pushing for a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion. Anthropic's most recent results showed quarterly revenue of $17 billion along with a swing to an operating loss, as computing costs rose with demand.

Capacity measured in gigawatts has become the industry's main way of describing scale. For leading AI developers, securing electricity and data centre space is now a competitive advantage in its own right. But each new commitment raises the question of whether revenue will grow fast enough to cover multi-decade contracts for chips and power.

For Gulf readers, the figures show the scale of demand that regional sovereign investors and energy companies are trying to meet. Executives at ADIPEC in Abu Dhabi this week said AI data centres are a growing source of long-term power and gas demand. Several Gulf-backed infrastructure platforms are seeking to host capacity for frontier AI labs.

The company's push to double capacity in a single year would also put more pressure on supply chains that are already tight. Memory chip prices have doubled as manufacturers send supply to data centre buyers first, and utilities in the US are reporting record backlogs of data centre connection requests.