Anthropic is spending nearly $900 billion to secure computing power for Claude

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, has committed $895.4 billion through 2045 to computing power and chip deals, according to its public offering filing. Most of those deals it cannot back out of. The reason is simple: the company ran short of computing power late last year, and it has been buying all it can find ever since.

What changed

Computing power means the chips and electricity that run AI. Anthropic needs it to build new models and to serve products like Claude to businesses and consumers. Its CEO, Dario Amodei, described the guesswork over how much it would need as a "cone of uncertainty." The company then signed dozens of contracts with tech giants, chipmakers, data center startups and former cryptocurrency miners.

This year Anthropic is expected to have more than 3.5 gigawatts of computing power, about the electricity used by all homes in Chicago, according to two people with knowledge of its plans. Next year it aims to double that.

Where the money goes

• Google: $121.3 billion
• SpaceX: $120.5 billion
• Amazon: $110 billion
• Microsoft: $44.9 billion
• Neocloud firms Fluidstack ($50 billion) and Lambda ($41.3 billion)

Neoclouds are companies that rent out computing power. Anthropic also works with former crypto miners such as TeraWulf and Hut 8 to build data centers. These firms have land and power and can get capacity running sooner than Amazon or Microsoft, which have backlogs. The Google, Amazon, Microsoft and SpaceX figures run through 2036.

Why you may notice

Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding tool, became a hit last year. Demand outran supply. The company had to limit free use of its products and raise prices for some of them. Tom Brown, Anthropic's chief compute officer, called finding enough computing power "very clearly the bottleneck for all of our progress."

The hurdles

Building this capacity is not easy. Fluidstack pushed back on some Anthropic data center designs over worries that power swings could cut off electricity and damage equipment. A solution was reached. In upstate New York, TeraWulf competed for electricians with the owners of the Buffalo Bills' stadium. Anthropic and TeraWulf asked the local union for traveling electricians, which made the project more expensive.

What happens next

The spending is huge, and Anthropic is leaning on outside money. It could conduct what may be the largest-ever initial public offering this month, one that could raise $100 billion. It also raised $63 billion in debt last week. Even so, it has warned it may need more financing sooner than expected. Anthropic declined to comment on the record before its IPO.