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Meta is in talks with Anthropic to lease computing power to the AI startup. It’s a move that could put the social media giant in competition with Amazon, Microsoft and Google in a new business field called cloud computing.
Talks about a potential deal are still in the early stages, a person familiar with the matter confirmed to CNN.
The talks were first reported by The New York Times, which cited three people familiar with the discussions and estimated the deal could be worth up to $10 billion over two years. CNN sources said the specific numbers reported were only speculation.
Meta and Anthropic declined to comment on the meeting.
Becoming a compute provider could be a major new revenue opportunity for Meta, which is investing heavily in data center infrastructure to support its AI ambitions.
The social media giant plans to make between $125 billion and $145 billion in capital spending this year, primarily to support infrastructure development, Mehta said in its latest earnings report. This could be double the amount spent last year.
Meta announced in April that it would lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 people, to offset the costs of these investments.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned the possibility of leasing some of that infrastructure if the company’s computing needs can’t keep up with the expansion.
“Almost every week, different companies come to us from the outside and ask us if we have the math to buy at some premium to what we’re buying at,” Zuckerberg said at Meta’s annual shareholder meeting in May. “We haven’t done that yet because we think there’s a use for computing. But obviously, if we get to a point where we feel like we’re building too much, that’s an option we have.”
With companies large and small racing to deploy AI and major AI labs working to improve models, there is no shortage of demand for computing power. Anthropic already has multibillion-dollar computing license deals with Google, SpaceX, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Meanwhile, investors want Meta to show how its investments will benefit its bottom line, especially as it struggles to keep pace with AI offerings from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Meta stock (META) is down more than 8% since this time last year.
Meta released an upgraded version of its Muse Spark AI model last month, saying it could rival the coding capabilities of models such as OpenAI and Anthropic. For the first time, Meta has announced that it will offer a paid version of its service, another sign that the company is seeking bigger profits from AI.
