Meta in Talks with Anthropic for Data Center Lease

Meta is "in talks" with Anthropic to lease some of its data centers, according to a new report in The New York Times. The discussions are still in early stages, the report says, but could end in a deal worth up to $10 billion over two years.

The report follows earlier reporting from Bloomberg that the social media company was eyeing an entry into the cloud services business. Providing compute resources to other companies would be an entirely new business for Meta, which makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously hinted at the possibility of selling its data center space. During an earnings call last year, he said that the company fields such requests "almost every week" and that he considered it "an option" for the future.

While Meta and Anthropic are ostensibly rivals on the AI front, such an arrangement could benefit both companies. Meta has been making massive investments in AI data centers to fuel its own ambitions to build leading AI models. That level of expenditure has also raised some eyebrows as Meta has said it expects to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion in 2026 alone.