Anthropic Buys 3.4 Billion Dollars of Gas Generators, Enough for 1.7 Gigawatts: AI Is No Longer Waiting for Power From the Grid

Anthropic, the company preparing for a stock market listing this year, is buying natural gas generators from Caterpillar worth 3.4 billion dollars. The turbines can produce up to 1.7 gigawatts of electricity. They were originally ordered by another firm, equipment supplier OnePWR, which failed to secure financing. Anthropic planned to buy them from it, but in the end went directly to the manufacturer. Why OnePWR couldn't find money despite having a buyer like Anthropic isn't clear. What is clear is that the capacity won't now end up with a competitor.

Until now Anthropic preferred renting to buying. In its listing prospectus, published in May, the company revealed that it pays xAI, the SpaceX subsidiary, 1.25 billion dollars a month for computing power, all the way until May 2029, and announced new similar deals. But rented servers mean nothing if there's no electricity for them. The queue for gas turbines stretches into the early 2030s, and the queue to connect to the power grid is almost as long. Buying looks like a last resort, not a strategy.

Anthropic isn't alone. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have announced their own gas plants next to their data centres, so as not to depend on the public grid. The boom has given new life to fracking, the method of extracting gas from underground rock. If construction goes to plan, US data centres could be using more natural gas than Germany and Japan combined by 2035.

Anyone who has lived through an energy crisis knows what it means to depend on the price of gas. One analyst expects prices in some markets could more than triple by the end of the decade. If that happens, the 3.4-billion turbines could become the most expensive mistake in the prospectus. The industry that promises the future is, for now, building it on last century's fuel.