Anthropic to spend $50 billion on US data center buildout

Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) on Wednesday announced it will spend $50 billion to build out AI data centers in Texas and New York. The company says the data centers will be constructed with the help of Fluidstack, which helps build out massive GPU clusters.

According to Anthropic, the investment will create up to 2,400 construction jobs and 800 permanent positions when the data centers come online in 2026.

“We’re getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren’t possible before,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement.

“Realizing that potential requires infrastructure that can support continued development at the frontier. These sites will help us build more capable AI systems that can drive those breakthroughs, while creating American jobs,” he added.

Anthropic said that the data centers are necessary to meet demand from “hundreds of thousands of businesses” using its Claude platform while allowing it to continue to perform research on frontier models.

The company said it will continue to prioritize “cost-effective, capital-efficient approaches” to achieving the scale necessary to meet its needs.

Anthropic said it currently serves more than 300,000 business customers. Its number of large accounts with revenue run rates of more than $100,000 has also grown by nearly sevenfold over the past year.

Wall Street analysts and investors have begun to raise questions about how AI companies like Anthropic can pay for the billions of dollars in data centers they’re constructing around the globe.

Those concerns were on display during AMD’s (AMD) Financial Analyst Day on Tuesday when analysts repeatedly asked CEO Lisa Su how customers like OpenAI (OPAI.PVT), which has plans to spend more than $1 trillion on data centers, will pay for its buildout.

Su, however, pushed back, saying that if there’s enough demand for artificial intelligence, there will likely be plenty of cash to pay for it.

“This is a very unique moment in AI, and we shouldn’t be shortsighted in thinking about, ‘Hey, are you going to see returns in a couple of quarters, or are people going to be interested in financing it?’ If the AI usage grows as much as we expect, I think there’s going to be plenty of financing,” Su added.

In addition to its plan to spend $50 billion on its own data centers, Anthropic recently inked deals to use up to 1 million of Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) custom AI chips and an additional 1 million of Amazon’s (AMZN) custom chips.