san francisco — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced a $50 billion investment in computing infrastructure on Wednesday that will include new data centers in Texas and New York.
Anthropic, the maker of chatbot Claude, said it is working with London-based Fluidstack to build new computing facilities to power its AI systems. It did not reveal their exact locations or the source of electricity they would need.
A report last month from TD Coin said that major cloud computing providers leased a “staggering” amount of U.S. data center capacity in the fiscal third quarter of this year, amounting to more than 7.4 gigawatts of capacity, more than last year’s total combined.
Oracle was securing the most capacity during that period, much of it supporting the AI workloads of Anthropic’s main competitor OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Google came in second place, and Fluidstack came in third, ahead of Meta, Amazon, CoreWeave, and Microsoft.
Anthropic said its projects will create about 800 permanent jobs and 2,400 construction jobs. “The scale of this investment is necessary to meet growing demand for Cloud from hundreds of thousands of companies while keeping our research at the forefront,” she said in a statement.
The technology industry’s huge spending on computing infrastructure for AI startups that have yet to turn a profit has raised concerns about an AI investment bubble.
Investors have closely watched a series of tangled deals in recent months between major AI developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic and companies that are building the expensive computer chips and data centers needed to power their AI products. Anthropic said it will continue to “prioritize cost-effective and capital-efficient approaches” to expand its business.