Meta and Anthropic are in talks for a $10 billion deal that would make Meta an AI landlord to its own rival

[Dan]

Meta Platforms is in early discussions to lease computing power from its own data centers to Anthropic, in a deal that could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years, according to the New York Times, which cited three people familiar with the confidential discussions. Anthropic reportedly initiated the proposal in June, and Meta is currently evaluating it, with any agreement structured around regular monthly payments and an option for either side to walk away before the two years are up

The arrangement would create a genuinely strange dynamic, Meta builds its own competing Llama models while simultaneously acting as Anthropic's infrastructure landlord. But that kind of overlap has already become routine across the industry, SpaceX sells GPU access to both Anthropic and Google, and Google itself sells Gemini to Meta while separately rationing its own access because it can't meet demand. Anthropic already has multibillion dollar compute deals in place with Google, SpaceX, Microsoft and Amazon, and the potential Meta arrangement would be smaller than its existing $45 billion, three year agreement with SpaceX to tap the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis

For Meta, this represents a genuine strategic pivot, a step toward the cloud computing business CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been signaling interest in for months, telling shareholders in May that entering cloud computing was definitely on the table given how often companies were approaching Meta wanting to buy spare capacity or model access. Meta shares climbed off their lows Friday following the report, even as the stock remains down more than 8 percent from a year ago, with investors clearly wanting to see Meta's massive infrastructure spending, projected at $125 to $145 billion in capital expenditure this year, start generating direct revenue rather than just supporting internal AI development

The underlying driver across the whole industry is a genuine compute shortage, Nvidia chip access remains the binding constraint for every major AI lab, forcing Anthropic to cap how much users can interact with its most advanced models even as the company approaches a trillion dollar valuation. Both companies declined to comment, and the talks remain nascent enough that there's no guarantee they result in a signed agreement

Meta in talks to rent some of its billions in AI infrastructure to Anthropicwww.bnnbloomberg.ca

[Static Estuary]

Meta competing with Anthropic on models while potentially hosting Anthropic's infrastructure is such a strange arrangement on paper, but SpaceX already does the exact same thing selling to both Anthropic and Google