Last October, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned almost in passing that companies kept asking Meta if they could buy computing capacity from it, at a premium. It sounded like a hypothetical. On July 17, the New York Times turned it into a very real story.
Meta and Anthropic are in early talks for a potential computing deal worth as much as $10 billion over two years, the New York Times reported, citing three people with knowledge of the discussions. Anthropic proposed the arrangement in June. Meta is reviewing it. Both companies declined to comment, and the talks are early enough that they may not result in a deal at all.
The basic structure, as the Times described it, would have Anthropic paying Meta in monthly installments over two years with an option for either party to exit early. CNBC independently confirmed the talks, according to CNBC. CNN also confirmed the conversations but noted its source said any specific dollar figures in the reports are speculative.
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Meta stock fell as much as 6% on July 17 before paring losses after the report came out, ending the day down about 2%.
The potential deal would be smaller than Anthropic's existing arrangement with SpaceX, which signed a $45 billion, three-year compute deal in May giving Anthropic access to the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. A Meta arrangement would layer on top of that, giving Anthropic yet another major source of GPU capacity.
For Meta, the Anthropic talks are the clearest sign yet that the company is serious about entering the cloud computing business. Zuckerberg said in May that Meta was considering it as a way to show investors that its AI spending can generate revenue beyond advertising. The internal name for the effort is already circulating: Meta Compute.
The infrastructure is already being built. Meta is expected to spend as much as $145 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, more than double the $72 billion it spent last year, mostly on AI hardware and data centers.
The company cut 8,000 jobs in May while redirecting billions toward AI buildout. It also recently hired Dave Brown, a former senior executive at Amazon Web Services, a move that signals the cloud ambitions go beyond a single leasing deal.
"We hear from companies regularly that are asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we've bought it at," Zuckerberg said in October 2025.
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