Anthropic signs over 1 gigawatt data center lease, reportedly seeking payment guarantees from Google

According to Reuters, Anthropic has signed more than 12 preliminary leasing agreements for data centers in the United States, with a total capacity exceeding 1 gigawatt. It is reported that Anthropic executives are discussing with Google about providing financial guarantees for these lease payments, while Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are providing private credit as part of a broader financing structure.

Google's Gemini directly competes with Anthropic's Claude, but Google has committed up to $40 billion in investment to Anthropic and is participating in joint server chip design. Last month, Anthropic completed a $65 billion financing round with a valuation of $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI to become the AI company with the highest implied market value, and has secretly submitted a U.S. IPO application.

Previously, Anthropic mainly relied on cloud service providers like Google Cloud for computing power, and building its own data centers aims to reduce dependence on competitors. In addition, Anthropic pays SpaceX (also a competitor through xAI) $1.25 billion per month for computing power. Neither Google nor Anthropic has publicly responded to specific details.