Anthropic invests $3.4 billion in gas-fired power generation for data centers

The company Anthropic has signed a deal with OnePWR Solutions worth $3.4 billion. The funds are earmarked for the purchase of gas generators that will provide 1.7 GW of power for data center needs. This is currently the largest one-time investment by an AI company in power equipment.

The shortage of power capacity in the U.S. is forcing AI developers to switch to autonomous power sources. Connection timelines for new facilities to the public power grid in some regions are stretching until 2030, making the construction of proprietary generation capacity a strategic necessity. Unlike renewable sources, gas and nuclear energy provide a stable base load, which is critical for the continuous operation of computing clusters.

Other market players are implementing a similar strategy. For instance, Google previously invested $4.4 billion in Constellation Energy to upgrade nuclear power plants, expecting to receive an additional 890 MW of energy over the next two decades. In parallel, Meta and xAI are developing their own projects to deploy gas turbines to power their supercomputers.

For the industry, this signifies a shift from competing solely for chips to fighting for access to energy resources. Direct procurement of generation equipment allows companies to reduce their dependence on overloaded municipal grids and avoid delays in deploying infrastructure for model training and inference.