Meta in $10bn compute lease talks with Anthropic
A potential two-year, $10 billion agreement would mark Meta's first major move to monetize its massive AI infrastructure investments beyond its core advertising business.
Meta Platforms is negotiating a computing power lease with Anthropic that could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years. Anthropic, the developer behind Claude Code, originally proposed the arrangement in June. The terms remain fluid, and both companies would have the right to exit the agreement early.
The potential transaction did little to insulate Meta's stock from a broader technology sector selloff. Shares of the social media giant pared their losses slightly on the news but still traded down nearly 3%. Anthropic declined to comment, Meta did not immediately respond to requests for confirmation, and the report could not be independently verified.
For Meta, this lease represents a significant strategic shift. The company has committed vast sums to building data centers and acquiring hardware to train its own artificial intelligence models. Securing a third-party tenant would allow Meta to diversify its revenue base away from its core advertising operations and establish a new income stream from its heavy infrastructure investments.
Entering the external compute market would position Meta as a direct competitor to specialized cloud providers like CoreWeave and Nebius. The growing enterprise adoption of advanced AI tools has created a severe shortage of computing capacity. Companies that control massive server farms are increasingly moving to lease out their excess power to meet this surging demand.
On the other side of the transaction, the deal highlights the capital requirements facing independent AI developers. Paying Meta in monthly increments would allow Anthropic to secure the heavy processing power needed to train frontier models. This approach lets the startup avoid the massive upfront capital expenditures associated with building proprietary data centers.
The inclusion of early exit options is a notable detail for market professionals assessing the deal's stability. While it provides necessary flexibility in a rapidly evolving hardware market, it limits the long-term revenue visibility for Meta's infrastructure division. If finalized, the agreement would signal a new era where foundational tech companies directly monetize their hardware ecosystems.
