Meta is considering leasing some of its data centers to AI company Anthropic, according to a new report from The New York Times. The discussions are still early, but the deal could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years, which would make it one of the largest compute-leasing arrangements in the industry.
As reported by Engadget, this follows earlier reporting from Bloomberg that Meta was looking at getting into cloud services. Selling compute capacity to other companies would be a completely new line of business for the Facebook and Instagram parent, which still gets the overwhelming majority of its revenue from advertising.
The timing makes sense when you look at the numbers. Meta has said it expects to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion in 2026 alone, much of it on AI infrastructure. That level of spending has drawn scrutiny from investors who want to see a clearer path to returns. Leasing unused or underused data center capacity would help Meta justify those costs by turning fixed infrastructure into direct income.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been laying the groundwork for this idea for a while. During an earnings call last year, he said the company gets requests to buy or lease its compute capacity “almost every week” and described it as “an option” for the future. A deal with Anthropic would be the first real step in that direction.
The fact that Meta and Anthropic compete in the AI model space makes this arrangement unusual, but not surprising. The economics on both sides are straightforward:
- Meta gets a new revenue stream to offset its enormous infrastructure spending
- Anthropic gets access to large-scale compute without having to build or own the hardware
- Both companies benefit without directly threatening the other’s core products
Anthropic has shown it is willing to do exactly these kinds of deals. Earlier this summer, the Claude maker signed a similar compute agreement with SpaceX’s xAI, which was reportedly worth $45 billion over three years. Anthropic raised rate limits for Claude Code subscribers almost immediately after that deal closed, which suggests how much additional capacity it unlocked.
For Meta, this is about more than one deal. If the Anthropic talks succeed, it would signal that Meta is serious about competing in the cloud infrastructure space alongside Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Those companies have built major businesses on selling compute to AI startups, and Meta’s data center scale could make it a credible rival. The question is whether one multibillion-dollar lease turns into a broader strategy, or stays a one-off arrangement to make the balance sheet look a little better.
