Anthropic announces $50 billion data center plan (techcrunch.com)

Anthropic has committed $50 billion to build custom data centers in Texas and New York through a new partnership with U.K. neocloud provider Fluidstack, with sites slated to come online throughout 2026. The facilities are described as “custom built for Anthropic with a focus on maximizing efficiency for our workloads,” a direct response to the intense compute demands of the company’s Claude models. The move complements existing cloud deals with Google and Amazon and marks Anthropic’s first major foray into bespoke infrastructure aimed at supporting frontier model training and inference that the company says will enable faster scientific discovery and complex problem solving. The deal is significant because it signals deeper vertical integration in AI compute supply chains and validates Fluidstack — a rising neocloud vendor that has won major partnerships (including a French 1 GW AI project) and early access to Google’s custom TPUs. Anthropic’s $50B pledge aligns with its optimistic revenue forecasts (reportedly $70B revenue and $17B positive cash flow by 2028) but sits well below mega-spending peers (Meta’s $600B and the SoftBank/OpenAI/Oracle Stargate $500B plans). The announcement highlights both the race for specialized, efficient AI infrastructure and industry-wide questions about oversized capital commitments, potential overcapacity, and the economics of sustaining extreme-scale model development.