Artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced a $50 billion investment in computing infrastructure on Wednesday that will include new data centers in Texas and New York.
Microsoft also announced on Wednesday a new data center under construction in Atlanta, Georgia, describing it as being connected to another center in Wisconsin to form a “massive supercomputer” running on hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips to power artificial intelligence technology.
The latest deals show the tech industry is pressing ahead with massive spending to build power-hungry AI infrastructure, despite persistent financial concerns about a bubble. Environmental considerations and Political implications Of rapidly rising electricity bills in communities being built.
Anthropic, the maker of chatbot Claude, said it is working with London-based Fluidstack to build new computing facilities to power its AI systems. It did not reveal their exact locations or the source of electricity they would need.
Another company, cryptocurrency mining data center developer TeraWulf, previously revealed it was working with Fluidstack on Google-backed data center projects in Texas and New York, on the shore of Lake Ontario. TeraWulf declined to comment on Wednesday.
A report last month from TD Coin said that major cloud computing providers leased a “staggering” amount of U.S. data center capacity in the fiscal third quarter of this year, amounting to more than 7.4 gigawatts of capacity, more than last year’s total combined.
Oracle was securing the most capacity during that period, much of it supporting the AI workloads of Anthropic’s main competitor OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Google took second place, and Fluidstack came in third, ahead of Meta, Amazon, CoreWeave, and Microsoft.
Anthropic said its projects will create about 800 permanent jobs and 2,400 construction jobs. “The scale of this investment is necessary to meet growing demand for Cloud from hundreds of thousands of companies while keeping our research at the forefront,” she said in a statement.
Microsoft named its data center in Atlanta Fairwater 2, after the original Fairwater complex built near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The company said it will help power its technology, along with OpenAI and other AI developers. Microsoft was, until earlier this year, the exclusive cloud computing provider for OpenAI before the two companies modified their partnership. OpenAI has since announced infrastructure commitments worth more than $1 trillion, many of which are tied to its Stargate project with partners Oracle and SoftBank.
The technology industry’s huge spending on computing infrastructure for AI startups that have yet to turn a profit has raised concerns about an AI investment bubble.
Investors have closely watched a series of tangled deals in recent months between major AI developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic and companies that are building the expensive computer chips and data centers needed to power their AI products. Anthropic said it will continue to “prioritize cost-effective and capital-efficient approaches” to expand its business.
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