23rd September 2026 – (San Francisco) Anthropic is in early negotiations to lease as much as one gigawatt of datacentre capacity from a developer controlled by Apollo Global Management, a move aimed at cutting its dependence on big cloud landlords for training and inference power.
People familiar with the matter said the company is discussing a direct lease of sites being built by Stream Data Centers and plans to install tensor processing units designed by Broadcom and Google. Talks have also touched on whether Google might extend credit support for the project.
Insiders said Nvidia graphics processors could also be placed in the same halls. Developers estimate that a one-gigawatt compute footprint would need at least US$40 billion of capital investment, whichever chip mix wins out.
Anthropic still meets most of its compute needs by renting chip servers from Amazon Web Services, Google and SpaceX. It has already agreed smaller direct leases with facilities run by former bitcoin miners Hut 8 and TeraWulf, giving it tighter control of racks and a path to lower unit costs.
Any Stream deal could take months and may still fall apart. The exact capacity Anthropic wants remains fluid, as does the financing structure, though the model maker would likely have to guarantee the lease and raise money for the chips sitting inside.
Beyond bricks-and-mortar leases, Anthropic has begun renting silicon straight from vendors, including an AMD pact covering chips rated at two gigawatts of power, and a US$35 billion arrangement to lease TPUs through a special-purpose vehicle backed by Apollo and Blackstone. Broadcom has signalled appetite to help finance more than 20 gigawatts with those institutions, a chip shopping list that could approach US$700 billion if fully drawn.