Anthropic Locked In $517B of Compute in 11 Months

Anthropic has signed roughly $517 billion in compute contracts over the past 11 months, locking in at least 14.8 gigawatts of capacity for deployment over the next several years. The tally was first reported by The Information and subsequently detailed by Data Center Dynamics. It is a figure with no real precedent for a company that has yet to trade a single public share.

The bulk of it sits with two cloud providers. Contracts with Amazon and Google together cover about 11 GW over ten years, worth more than $300 billion between them. Below that tier the list runs wide: roughly $30 billion for about 1 GW on Microsoft Azure, up to $45 billion with SpaceX running through 2029, some $80 billion split between Lambda and nScale for around 460 MW over six years, about $50 billion tied to data centers Fluidstack is building in Texas and New York, roughly $10 billion with Norway’s Volta, and the $5 billion, 2-gigawatt AMD deal signed in July.

What turned a procurement plan into a buying spree was demand the company did not forecast. Anthropic attributes the surge to this year’s growth in Claude Code and Cowork — agentic products that burn far more tokens per user than a chat window does, and whose inference load arrives in sustained bursts rather than in the tidy curve a capacity planner would prefer. The result has been a run of deals struck at unusual speed and in unusual shapes, including the $19 billion, 20-year lease with TeraWulf, a 191 MW lease from a bitcoin miner, and a set of data centers it will run but not own.

The gap between plan and reality is the striking part. In December, Anthropic told investors it expected to spend about $180 billion on server rentals through 2029. Nine months later the contracted commitment is close to three times that. Much of it is structured take-or-pay, meaning the payments are owed whether or not the capacity is used — an obligation that converts a demand miss into a fixed cost rather than a slower ramp.

Even at $517 billion, Anthropic is not the biggest buyer in the room. OpenAI has signaled plans to reach roughly 30 GW by 2030 on something near $750 billion of investment, which would put it at roughly double Anthropic’s current position. The two companies are effectively bidding against each other for the same transformers, turbines and grid interconnects, which is part of why contract durations have stretched to ten and twenty years.

The timing matters because the disclosure lands in front of an IPO. Anthropic filed confidentially with the SEC in June and is targeting a listing larger than SpaceX’s record, and it reported its first operating profit on $11.5 billion of revenue in August. Public-market investors will now get to price a business whose margin structure is set less by what it charges than by a decade of contracts it has already signed.