Meta spent $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year. That is more than double last year's spending. Wall Street was worried.
Now Meta might finally have a way to answer those worries. The company is in preliminary talks to lease up to $10 billion of computing capacity to Anthropic over two years. Anthropic proposed the deal in June. Meta is evaluating it.
If it happens, Anthropic will pay Meta in monthly installments. Both companies can opt out early. The terms are still in flux. This is not a done deal. But it is a signal of where the industry is heading.
Anthropic is desperate for more compute. The company recently signed a $45 billion, three-year deal with SpaceX — about $1.25 billion per month. That deal gave Anthropic access to Colossus 1, a 300-megawatt data center in Memphis with over 220,000 Nvidia chips. Anthropic also has deals with Google, Amazon, and Broadcom. The company is signing agreements with everyone who owns GPUs.
The reason is simple: compute is the bottleneck. Anthropic's Fable 5 model is still under usage limits because the company cannot run it at scale. Every new customer means more GPU demand. And there are not enough GPUs to go around.
For Meta, the deal is a test. The company has been building data centers for its own AI models — Instagram recommendations, Facebook feeds, generative AI features. But its own models are not the best in the industry. OpenAI and Anthropic are ahead.
Selling excess capacity to Anthropic lets Meta turn unused compute into revenue. It also gives Meta a new business line beyond advertising, which has been the company's only real revenue source for years.
Meta has been preparing for this move. In May, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said entering the cloud business was "definitely on the table." He said companies approach Meta "almost every week" about buying spare computing power. In July, Meta hired Dave Brown, a former AWS senior executive, as its infrastructure lead. The company is building a cloud business, even if it has not officially launched it yet.
The market reaction was muted. Meta's stock briefly jumped 2% on the news, but ended the day down nearly 3%. Investors are still skeptical.
The skepticism is not unreasonable. The $10 billion deal is small relative to Meta's $145 billion annual spend — just 7 percent. It is also only one-third the size of Anthropic's SpaceX deal. And Meta has never run a cloud business before. Competing with AWS, Azure, and specialist providers like CoreWeave and Nebius will not be easy.
But the direction matters more than the size. AI compute is becoming a tradable asset. SpaceX is selling it. Meta is considering it. Anthropic is buying it from everyone. The market is emerging.
P.S. If you are an investor in Meta, the $10 billion number is not the story — it's that Meta finally has a way to turn its AI infrastructure into a revenue line, not just a cost line. Whether that revenue grows fast enough to justify $145 billion in annual spend is the real question, and the answer won't come from one deal.
