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ZDNET Highlights
- Anthropic will spend $50 billion to build its own data centers.
- They will be in Texas, New York and elsewhere across the US.
- This could set new standards for AI labs attempting large-scale efforts.
Anthropic company will invest $50 billion in building its own data centers announced Tuesday — a move that could have wide-ranging impacts on an industry that is already racing to build AI infrastructure.
“Anthropic serves more than 300,000 business customers, and our number of large accounts – customers that each represent more than $100,000 in run-rate revenue – has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year,” the company wrote in the announcement, citing the demand behind the expansion.
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The new facilities — to be built in Texas, New York and other locations across the country that have not yet been disclosed — “will be custom-built for Anthropic, focused on maximizing efficiency for our workloads, enabling continued research and development at the frontier,” the blog post said.
an emerging trend
Tuesday’s announcement marks Anthropic’s first foray into building its own data centers. Vijay Gadepalli, a senior scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory and co-founder of software company Bay Compute, said it could be a harbinger of a broader trend across the tech industry, as young companies look to secure sustainable sources of computing power.
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“I think it’s definitely a direction that we’ll see more happening,” Gadepalli told ZDNET. “Three or four years ago, the biggest constraint was how many GPUs you could get, and that’s why many of these larger model developers essentially signed strategic agreements with large cloud providers or hyperscalers to get guaranteed access.”
The new effort by Anthropic to build its own custom data centers, Gadepalli said, “is the next logical progression of that: How much verticalization of compute can you get your hands on?”
Most AI startups do not have the funds of OpenAI or Anthropic, and must continue to rely on partnerships and leasing agreements with third-party AI infrastructure companies. But for the small subset of developers who can afford it, it may be possible to follow in Anthropic’s footsteps by building proprietary data centers.
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“For companies that are training the frontier model at scale, there’s a good chance you’ll see increased verticalization,” he said.
Bubble fears and inflated promises
Anthropic’s new data center construction project will reportedly propel the company to achieve major new advancements with its technology.
“We are getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren’t possible before,” company CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei said in the announcement. “Recognizing that capability requires infrastructure that can support continued growth at the border. These sites will help us build more capable AI systems that can build on those successes while creating American jobs.”
Anthropic said that as the new sites come online next year, they will create 800 permanent jobs and 2,400 construction jobs, helping to advance goals set out in the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan. The action plan released this summer focuses on enhancing infrastructure to maintain the US’s competitive edge in the AI race over other countries, especially China.
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At a time when fears are rising about a potential AI bubble, such announcements have become a common refrain among AI developers. While billions of dollars from investors are still flowing freely into AI, some experts worry that the technology will not be able to help financially in the long run, and the US economy could suffer as a result.
Last week, OpenAI wrote in a blog post that “superintelligence” — a hypothetical AI system far more advanced than the human brain — could lead to “a world of widely distributed abundance” by aiding scientific discovery and drug development, for example.
Only time will tell whether such promises can be turned into reality – and whether concerns about an AI bubble are justified.
Anthropic vs other AI labs
As the stakes in the AI race have increased, so has the demand for energy among tech developers. The supercomputers behind consumer chatbots like Cloud, ChatGPT, and Gemini require a lot of electrical power to fuel them, and they in turn require huge amounts of water to keep them from constantly overheating. data center also Increase energy costs for residential areas around them.
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All the infrastructure that provides energy is expensive, meaning deep-pocketed legacy tech companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google’s parent company Alphabet have an immediate advantage over most startups trying to sell new AI products. But OpenAI and Anthropic – both relatively young companies that rushed to launch hugely popular chatbots – have been two of the most successful exceptions to that rule.
(Disclosure: ZDNET’s parent company Ziff Davis filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.)
Founded as a nonprofit in 2015, OpenAI began receiving billions of dollars in capital from Microsoft four years later, enabling it to rapidly build new models and invest in the infrastructure needed to power them. OpenAI does not have these features; However, it mostly leases these from developers specializing in data center construction. Although the company is restructuring toward an ambitious future, it still relies on partnerships to access the computing infrastructure that fuels all of its AI products.
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Earlier this month, for example, OpenAI announced it would pay Amazon Web Services $38 billion for access to that company’s cloud computing services as it accelerates its efforts to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) — and, more immediately, achieve the goals it set out in January when it launched Project Stargate, a collaborative data center construction project with the government and other big tech firms.
So far, Anthropic has pursued a similar course, primarily using data center architecture provided by its two biggest financial backers, Alphabet and Amazon. But the company has grown explosively since its founding in 2021 — with a reported valuation of $183 billion in September — thanks largely to the popularity of the cloud among enterprise users. Therefore its options have expanded.
