Meta (META.US) plans to lease AI computing power to Anthropic, seeking commercial returns through a capital expenditure of billions of dollars.

According to informed sources, the artificial intelligence startup company Anthropic is currently in preliminary discussions with Meta (META.US) to lease the latter's artificial intelligence computing resources to meet the growing demand for large model training and inference. This negotiation comes just a few weeks after Anthropic announced a similar collaboration with Elon Musk's SpaceX (SPCX.US). At that time, Anthropic stated that they would use SpaceX's computing resources at the Colossus 1 data center to enhance their service capabilities for paying subscribers. Industry experts believe that Anthropic's continuous search for external computing power partnerships reflects their status as one of the world's leading companies in large model development, and they are still ramping up efforts to acquire NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) AI chips and related computing resources to support model training and inference needs. Currently, a sufficient supply of AI chips remains a major challenge for companies like Anthropic in the artificial intelligence industry. Due to limited computing resources, the company has implemented usage restrictions on some advanced models, including Fable. Meanwhile, Meta is also actively seeking to transform their massive AI infrastructure into new sources of revenue. In May of this year, Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that the company is considering entering the cloud computing business, aiming to demonstrate to investors that AI investments can create new business value in addition to enhancing their existing social media business. Market expectations suggest that Meta's capital expenditure in 2026 could reach a maximum of $145 billion, with most of it being invested in artificial intelligence infrastructure construction. Furthermore, it has been confirmed by the media that Dave Brown, who previously served as a senior executive in Amazon.com, Inc.'s cloud technology division, is set to join Meta, seen as a significant move for the company to further expand its AI infrastructure and cloud computing business. In fact, Meta has long seen the market demand for providing computing power services externally. Zuckerberg stated in October last year that many companies have been inquiring whether Meta is willing to sell idle computing resources, even willing to pay prices higher than the company's procurement costs for relevant computing capabilities. If Meta ultimately reaches a partnership with Anthropic, it not only opens up new revenue channels for their AI infrastructure investments but also signifies that the global competition in the artificial intelligence industry for high-end computing resources is intensifying.