The buildout, designed to meet the company’s surging enterprise demand and sustain its frontier AI research, marks one of the largest private infrastructure commitments by a single AI company. The project will be developed in partnership with Fluidstack, a cloud computing firm known for supplying large-scale GPU clusters to clients including Meta, Midjourney, and Mistral.
According to Anthropic, the first facilities will go online in 2026, creating more than 2,000 construction jobs and 800 permanent roles. Additional sites across the U.S. are expected to follow.
“We’re getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren’t possible before,” CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement. “Realizing that potential requires infrastructure that can support continued development at the frontier.”
The investment positions Anthropic as a major domestic player in physical AI infrastructure at a time when policymakers are increasingly emphasizing technological sovereignty and U.S.-based compute capacity.
Racing OpenAI’s Trillion-dollar Buildout
The move follows rival OpenAI’s aggressive expansion. The ChatGPT maker has secured over $1.4 trillion in long-term infrastructure commitments through partnerships with Nvidia, Broadcom, Oracle, and major cloud providers Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.
That spending spree has prompted debate about whether America’s power grid and industrial base can sustain such rapid data center growth — and whether the sector is drifting into bubble territory.
Fluidstack Partnership And Rapid Scaling
Anthropic’s collaboration with Fluidstack aims to deliver custom-built facilities optimized for AI workloads, leveraging the firm’s ability to deliver gigawatt-scale deployments on tight timelines. In parallel, Amazon has already opened a $11 billion, 1,200-acre data center campus in Indiana dedicated to Anthropic workloads, while Anthropic has expanded its Google Cloud compute deal by tens of billions of dollars.
Currently serving over 300,000 business clients, Anthropic’s enterprise revenue has grown sharply, with large accounts — those spending $100,000 or more annually — increasing nearly sevenfold in the past year. Internal projections suggest the company could reach break-even by 2028, far ahead of OpenAI, which reportedly expects significant operating losses through that year.
Federal Policy Tensions
The role of the U.S. government in financing AI infrastructure remains contentious. Last week, OpenAI reportedly asked the Trump administration to extend CHIPS Act tax credits to include data centers and grid infrastructure, following comments from CFO Sarah Friar suggesting a potential government “backstop” for compute financing.
Though the company has since walked back the proposal, the episode underscores ongoing uncertainty around how — and by whom — America’s next-generation AI infrastructure will be funded.
