For years, Meta's data centers have been a cost center — a vast, capital-hungry backstop for ranking feeds and training Llama. On Friday, The New York Times reported that Meta is in talks to turn some of that concrete and silicon into a product, leasing computing power to Anthropic in an arrangement that could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years.
The talks are early. Three people familiar with the discussions told the Times the deal could still collapse, and neither company has commented publicly. But the mere existence of the conversation marks a turn in the AI infrastructure market: the company that has spent more than almost anyone building AI capacity is weighing whether to rent it to the rival building Claude.
What is on the table
According to the Times, Anthropic floated the idea in June. Under the terms being discussed, Anthropic would pay Meta in monthly increments across a two-year term — roughly $416 million a month at the top-end $10 billion figure — with both sides able to walk away early. That exit clause is not incidental. Anthropic is reportedly pressing for terms that let it cancel, the same hedge it built into its infrastructure deal with SpaceX.
The comparison is instructive. In May, Anthropic struck an agreement to tap Elon Musk's Colossus supercomputing capacity in Memphis, Tennessee, paying $1.25 billion per month — structured as a 180-day lease that either party can end on 90 days' notice. A Meta lease at $416 million a month would be roughly a third the size of what Anthropic is already paying SpaceX. It is a large deal by any normal standard and a supplementary one by Anthropic's.
Friday's report did not specify what hardware Anthropic would be renting. Meta's fleet mixes Nvidia GPUs with the MTIA 400, the custom accelerator it debuted in March. Anthropic's workloads already run on Nvidia silicon; porting them to Meta's in-house chips would be substantial engineering work for a contract either side can exit in months. The Nvidia capacity is the likelier target.
Investors noticed. Meta shares, down more than 5% in early trading Friday, narrowed their losses to under 2% after the report landed.
Meta as landlord
Mark Zuckerberg has been telegraphing this for the better part of a year. Last October, he noted that companies "regularly ask if we have compute they could buy from us at some premium." At Meta's shareholder meeting in May, he said entering cloud computing was "definitely on the table," adding that firms approach Meta almost every week wanting access to its models or spare capacity. Earlier this month, he told Bloomberg that exploring an AI cloud business "makes sense," while insisting Meta is currently using all the compute it has.
That last caveat is the tension in the whole story. Meta may spend as much as $145 billion in capital expenditure in 2026. This week alone it committed more than $50 billion to a Louisiana data center campus spanning 3,650 acres and supported by ten power plants. It cut 8,000 jobs in May while redirecting billions toward AI infrastructure. A marquee tenant paying $416 million a month does not repay that — but it converts an abstract bet into a revenue line, and it gives Zuckerberg something to show investors who have started asking pointed questions about depreciation schedules.
It would also drop Meta into a crowded market. Neoclouds like CoreWeave and Nebius rent GPUs for a living; so, now, does SpaceX, which sells to Anthropic and to Google — the latter reportedly paying $920 million a month. Meta has no cloud sales organization and no enterprise support motion. It has, however, hired former senior AWS executive Dave Brown. Signing Anthropic first would skip the credibility-building phase entirely.
The strangeness is hard to overstate. Meta launched Muse Spark 1.1, a coding-optimized model, just last week, and plans to sell API access at 75% less than Claude. Under this deal, Meta would host the workloads of the competitor it is trying to undercut on price.
Why it matters
For Anthropic, this is the clearest evidence yet of a deliberate multi-vendor compute strategy. The company already leans on Amazon and Google as investors and infrastructure partners, added SpaceX in May, and is now shopping Meta. Every contract is short-dated and cancelable. That is not indecision — it is a company approaching a $1 trillion valuation refusing to hand any single landlord leverage over its supply of intelligence, at a moment when compute scarcity is the binding constraint on its business. Anthropic still rations access to its most capable models. It cannot build fast enough, so it rents from whoever will sell, including people who would rather it failed.
For Meta, the logic runs the other way. If it can lease capacity at a premium on short terms, the enormous capex program stops looking like an unhedged bet on internal demand materializing. Zuckerberg has framed external customers as a backstop — a floor under the buildout. The catch is that a landlord with one tenant, on a contract that tenant can cancel, has not built a cloud business. It has built a very expensive month-to-month rental.
What to watch
Three things. First, whether the talks survive contact with Meta's org chart: the company does not sell compute today, and standing up the commercial machinery to do so is reportedly what has complicated the discussions. Second, Meta's next earnings call, where any confirmed cloud strategy — and its capex framing — would have to surface. Third, Anthropic's rate limits. When the SpaceX deal closed, Anthropic promptly raised API and Claude Code limits. A Meta contract worth a third as much would likely produce a smaller bump, but a bump nonetheless — and that would be the first public confirmation that a private lease had actually been signed.
Until then, this remains what the Times described: an early conversation between two competitors who each need something the other has.
"Companies regularly ask if we have compute they could buy from us at some premium."— Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta Platforms