Anthropic might be looking to make a deal with Meta Platforms to get access to more computing power, a move that would mark a major, but unsurprising, shift in the Facebook parent's business.
The New York Times reported Friday that Meta is in talks to rent computing power to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years, citing people familiar with the matter.
Anthropic declined to provide a comment. Meta didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
According to the report, Anthropic went to Meta with the proposed deal in June, and Meta is considering it.
The conversations are still in early stages and might not result in a deal. If a deal were to happen, Anthropic would pay Meta in monthly increments over the two-year period, and the companies would be able to opt out of any agreement early.
After the published report, Meta shares moved slightly higher from their session lows of $626 on Friday, but the stock was still down 2.9% to $645.51 amid a broader tech sector decline. The Nasdaq Composite was off 0.8% on Friday.
Anthropic has other existing computing partnerships. The artificial intelligence company said on May 6 that it had a partnership with SpaceX to give Anthropic access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity across over 220,000 Nvidia chips at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center in Tennessee.
A partnership with Meta would further prove just how badly AI companies need more computing power. Cloud providers are building out the infrastructure needed to power AI, but demand continues to outpace supply because building data centers takes time and massive amounts of capital. Meta is acutely aware of this, and Wall Street has been waiting for the tech giant to officially capitalize on that rising demand.
While Meta has its own data centers, it doesn't rent out cloud capabilities to other companies. That's something that separates its business model from massive hyperscalers like Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon.com, but has also been expected to change for some time.
"Almost every week there are different companies that come to us from outside asking us to both stand up an API service or asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we've bought it at," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the company's annual shareholder meeting on May 27.
"We haven't done that yet because we think that we have a use for the compute. But obviously if we get to a point where we feel that we have overbuilt, then that is an option that we have," he added.
Bloomberg reported on July 1 that Meta is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business that will sell access to AI computing power and models, citing people familiar with the matter.
Write to Angela Palumbo at angela.palumbo@dowjones.com
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July 17, 2026 14:52 ET (18:52 GMT)
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