Meta is in talks to rent $10 billion of computing power to rival Anthropic (META)

Meta (META) is in talks to rent computing power to Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude, in a deal that could be worth up to $10 billion, the New York Times reported Friday. The two companies build competing AI models. Meta would become Anthropic's landlord anyway.

We have been skeptical of the "Meta has too much compute" story since it first broke on July 1. Meta was turned down by Google (GOOGL) for more capacity that same week and is locked into tens of billions in take-or-pay cloud contracts it cannot walk away from. This report answers the question that was left hanging: if Meta rents out capacity, who actually shows up to pay for it. The Times says the answer is Anthropic.

What's reportedly being negotiated

The Times report follows earlier reporting from the newsletter SemiAnalysis, which said on July 3 that Meta was in "final talks" with Anthropic to run private instances of Claude inside Meta's own data centers. That structure would let Meta operate as infrastructure for a rival's model, similar to how Amazon (AMZN) hosts Claude for its own customers through Bedrock. SemiAnalysis estimated that leasing out just a couple hundred megawatts of capacity, at the roughly $50 billion-per-gigawatt annual rate SpaceX established with Anthropic in May, could generate more than $10 billion a year on its own. That is likely where Friday's number comes from.

Why Meta has capacity to sell

Meta has guided to $125 billion to $145 billion in capital spending for 2026, raised from an earlier $115 billion to $135 billion range when it reported first-quarter results in April. Around July 1, reports surfaced that infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan, Meta Superintelligence Labs head Daniel Gross, and president Dina Powell McCormick were building a business, reportedly called Meta Compute, to sell both raw capacity and model access to outside customers. The stock jumped about 7.5% that day.

Mark Zuckerberg had already flagged this in May, telling investors that selling compute was "definitely on the table," and that "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." A concrete $10 billion figure with a named counterparty is a different thing than a general statement of interest, though. It would be Meta's first disclosed customer.

Anthropic has been buying compute from everyone

If the number holds up, it fits a pattern. Anthropic signed a 20-year, $19 billion lease with TeraWulf (WULF) for a Kentucky campus in early July. It agreed to pay SpaceX roughly $1.25 billion a month for Colossus capacity in Memphis, a deal SpaceX's own S-1 describes as a three-year agreement, though Elon Musk has since said the real term is a shorter, cancellable six-month lease. Amazon has committed up to $25 billion and as much as 5 gigawatts of capacity, and Anthropic separately expanded a compute partnership with Google and Broadcom. Anthropic closed a $65 billion funding round in May at a $965 billion valuation and is reportedly eyeing a nearly $1 trillion IPO later this year, largely to fund exactly this kind of buildout. A Meta deal would be one more line item in a company that appears to be securing compute everywhere it can find it, rather than betting on any single supplier.

The part that's actually new here

Meta and Anthropic compete directly on models. Meta has its own Llama and Muse Spark model families, and it just broke ground on a $9 billion data center in Alberta the same week it was pitching itself as having spare capacity to lease out. Hosting a rival's flagship model on your own infrastructure, while still building aggressively for your own, only makes sense if the economics of being a landlord are good enough to outweigh the awkwardness. Amazon and Microsoft made that same call years ago in cloud computing generally. This would be the first time Meta has done it for a direct AI-model competitor, and for a number this large.

What isn't confirmed

Nothing here is signed. The Times describes talks and a potential deal size, not a completed contract, and neither company has reportedly commented on record. Deal terms, timing, and the exact capacity involved could all change or fall apart before anything is finalized, the same kind of capacity limits that led Google to tell Meta this spring it could not supply everything Meta wanted to buy.

META traded around $649 Friday midday, down about 2% from Thursday's close of $664.54. Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Nvidia (NVDA) were down a similar amount, while CoreWeave (CRWV) was slightly higher, which points to a broad tech pullback rather than a reaction specific to this report.

Prices and figures are as of midday trading Friday, July 17, 2026, and will move. This is market news and analysis, not investment advice.