Anthropic Spends $3.4B on Gas Generators

Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, has agreed to buy gas generators with a combined output of 1.7 gigawatts for $3.4 billion, the Financial Times reports. The equipment comes from a Texas firm called OnePWR, which had ordered the generators from heavy-equipment maker Caterpillar two years ago; Anthropic is now taking over that order. It is the largest known single purchase of power-generation equipment by an AI company.

Anthropic is preparing to go public and wants electricity for its data centers now, rather than wait years for a utility hookup. Elon Musk's xAI did something similar, buying $2 billion worth of gas turbines, and Google's parent Alphabet bought a power-plant developer called Intersect. Power, not just computer chips, is becoming a bottleneck for AI companies, and the biggest ones are choosing to build their own supply rather than stand in line for the grid.