Anthropic Spends $3.4 Billion on Gas Generators as AI’s Power Crunch Pushes It Into Hardware

Economic Warfare & Trade Policy › Energy & commodities

Anthropic has agreed to pay about $3.4 billion for 1.7 gigawatts of gas-fired generators to power its AI data centers, taking over an order for Caterpillar equipment originally placed by a Texas supplier, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, Nov. 8. The deal, signed in late September, marks a shift for a company that has mostly rented rather than owned the infrastructure behind its Claude models.

Anthropic bought commitments for the heavy-duty generators from OnePWR Solutions, a San Antonio-based equipment supplier, but did not acquire the company, CNBC reported, citing the FT. No OnePWR employees moved to Anthropic, though the deal includes the engineering and construction support needed to install the units. Reuters could not immediately verify the report, and neither company responded to its requests for comment.

How the deal came together

OnePWR ordered the generators about two years ago, before recent price increases, but needed financing to complete the purchase, according to Data Center Dynamics. Rather than simply becoming OnePWR’s customer, Anthropic took over the Caterpillar orders directly. The generators are expected to be available within two years, and OnePWR will help install them at Anthropic data centers, DCD reported. TechCrunch said it is not clear why OnePWR could not secure financing.

DCD called it the largest known single purchase of power-generation equipment by a frontier AI lab. By The Boston Report’s calculation from the reported figures, the price works out to about $2,000 per kilowatt of capacity, or $2 million per megawatt, for equipment alone.

Why an AI lab is buying turbines

Power has become a bottleneck for AI. TechCrunch reported that the backlog for natural gas turbines stretches into the early 2030s and that grid connection queues can be just as long. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have all announced plans for large on-site gas plants at data centers.

Anthropic expects to have more than 3.5 gigawatts of compute this year, with a similar amount due in 2027, DCD reported, citing the New York Times. Reuters reported in September that the company expects to spend more than $500 billion over the next decade on AI infrastructure.

What the filings show

Until now, Anthropic’s strategy has been to lease. Its prospectus lists compute lease commitments of $121.3 billion with Google, $120.5 billion with SpaceX, $110 billion with Amazon and $44.9 billion with Microsoft, along with deals with Fluidstack, Nscale and Lambda, according to DCD. Earlier this month the company disclosed $895.4 billion in cloud and data center commitments through 2045.

By The Boston Report’s count, the seven commitments shown above add up to about $532.6 billion, with the three largest providers, Google, SpaceX and Amazon, accounting for roughly two-thirds. Against that scale, the $3.4 billion generator deal is small, less than 1% of the total, but it is a direct ownership bet on power rather than computing time.

The risks

Relying on gas exposes AI companies to fuel prices. TechCrunch cited one analyst who expects gas prices could more than triple by the end of the decade in some markets, and estimates that U.S. data centers could use more natural gas than Germany and Japan combined by 2035 if the build-out proceeds. The deal lands amid a wider political fight over the power demands of AI, including calls for data center moratoriums that hit chip stocks last week.

Rivals are racing on the same front. OpenAI recently raised $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, and recent Ramp data on corporate AI spending showed how much demand for tokens keeps rising. Anthropic has not publicly commented on where the generators will be installed.

Sources

• CNBC: Anthropic secures $3.4 billion generator deal for AI data centers, FT reports
• Data Center Dynamics: Anthropic signs $3.4bn gas generator deal to support 1.7GW of data center power
• TechCrunch: Anthropic joins AI's natural gas frenzy, buys $3.4B worth of turbines