Anthropic Explores Compute Deal With Meta Worth Up to $10 Billion

Anthropic is in preliminary talks to lease computing power from Meta, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke to CNBC's Kate Rooney. The New York Times reported Friday that a potential deal could be worth roughly $10 billion, and Meta's stock climbed off its session lows after that report circulated.

Nothing is finalized, and both companies have stayed quiet on specifics. Meta declined to comment when asked. But the talks fit a pattern that's become increasingly familiar in the AI industry: labs racing to lock down enough computing capacity to keep their models running, even if that means striking deals with companies not traditionally in the cloud business.

This isn't Anthropic's first move of this kind. Weeks earlier, the company announced an arrangement with Elon Musk's SpaceX to tap computing capacity at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center, aimed at boosting capacity for Anthropic's paid subscribers. A potential Meta deal would extend that same strategy to a second unconventional partner.

The underlying problem is straightforward: there aren't enough advanced AI chips to go around. Anthropic, one of the industry's leading labs, already imposes usage limits on its most advanced models, including Fable, because it doesn't have unlimited access to Nvidia's chips. Those limits are a direct constraint on how many customers Anthropic can serve and how much it can charge them, which makes securing outside compute capacity a competitive necessity rather than a nice-to-have.

Meta, meanwhile, has been signaling for months that it sees an opportunity to sell excess capacity. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in May that Meta was weighing an entry into the cloud computing business outright. That's a notable pivot for a company built on social media and advertising, but it tracks with how much infrastructure Meta has been building. The company could spend as much as $145 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, much of it tied to AI infrastructure, according to CNBC's reporting.

Zuckerberg has also been fairly candid about the demand he's already seeing. Back in October, he said companies regularly approach Meta asking whether they can buy compute "at some premium to what we've bought it at." In other words, Meta has built out so much capacity for its own AI ambitions that other companies are now knocking on its door, and Zuckerberg has been open to the idea of turning that spare capacity into a business line.

Why chip scarcity is reshaping alliances

What's striking here is who's doing the supplying. SpaceX is a rocket company. Meta is a social media and advertising company. Neither was built to rent out server capacity to AI labs, yet both now have leverage in the AI race precisely because they've amassed huge amounts of Nvidia hardware for their own purposes. That flips the usual script, where cloud giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the default compute providers for AI labs.

For Anthropic, spreading its compute needs across multiple partners, SpaceX, potentially Meta, and presumably its existing cloud relationships, reduces its dependence on any single supplier at a moment when chip access is the tightest bottleneck in the industry. For Meta, a deal like this would mean turning a massive capital investment into a new revenue stream while it decides how seriously to pursue cloud computing as a business.

Nothing about the talks is confirmed beyond the early, preliminary stage described by CNBC's source. But the fact that they're happening at all, on the heels of the SpaceX arrangement, underscores just how aggressively AI labs are now chasing compute wherever they can find it, even from companies that, a few years ago, had no reason to be in this conversation at all.