The Claude peddler said it will set up new data centres in New York and Texas with Fluidstack, a UK cloud minnow chosen for what Anthropic called its “exceptional agility”, although that can mean they answer emails faster than the big lads.
Anthropic chief executive and co-founder Dario Amodei said: “We’re getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren’t possible before. Realising that potential requires infrastructure that can support continued development at the frontier.”
This splurge arrives while OpenAI is charging around town, cutting deals for chips and kit from Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Oracle, and Google, which various bean counters reckon totals about $1.5 trillion.
These cosy circular setups, where suppliers, investors, and customers all swap cash in a giant whirlpool, have some folk muttering about an AI bubble, but no one seems willing to stop spinning.
Anthropic has been beefing up its compute this year and only last month grabbed access to one million Google Cloud chips to feed and train its models, which should keep the servers sweating nicely.
The outfit leans on Amazon, which is its primary cloud partner and well-heeled investor, having lobbed 8bn dollars into the pot while building a monster 2.2GW data centre cluster in New Carlisle, Indiana, to juice Anthropic’s future models.
Fluidstack seems chuffed with the latest tie-up and its chief executive and co-founder, Gary Wu, said: “We’re proud to partner with frontier AI leaders like Anthropic to accelerate and deploy the infrastructure necessary to realise their vision”, which tells you how pleased he is to land a client waving $50 billion.
Anthropic, valued at $183 billion, was founded by former OpenAI staff and has primarily focused on enterprise customers, while its rival has focused on consumers.
Run-rate revenue has shot from $1 billion at the start of the year to $7 billion in the past month. By September, investors like Iconiq Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners had stuffed another $13 billion into the kitty, which explains why the spending taps are still wide open.