Markets META -2.79% JUL 18, 2026

Meta in early talks to lease $10B in compute to Anthropic, launching cloud business

Anthropic proposed a two-year deal in June that would pay Meta in monthly increments; META closed down 2% Friday as the PHLX Semiconductor Index shed 11% on the week.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

Meta Platforms is in early talks to lease Anthropic up to $10 billion of data-center capacity over two years, a deal that would, if it closes, formally birth the cloud business Mark Zuckerberg has spent a year hinting at. The New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg and CNBC all put the story out Friday. Both companies declined to comment.

According to a source cited by Reuters, Anthropic proposed the arrangement in June, with payment structured as monthly increments and an early-exit option for either side. That’s a soft structure for a nominally huge number, and it tells you the talks are genuinely preliminary.

The strategic logic is legible on both sides. Anthropic is capacity-starved: it has already capped usage on its most advanced models, including Claude Fable, and in May signed a $45 billion, three-year deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for full access to the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. Even that isn’t enough. Meta, meanwhile, is staring down 2026 capex of as much as $145 billion, up from $72 billion in 2025, and needs a revenue story that justifies the buildout to shareholders who watched the company cut 8,000 jobs in May.

Hence Meta Compute, the internal name for the effort, and the recent hire of former senior AWS executive Dave Brown. At Meta’s May shareholder meeting, Zuckerberg said entering cloud computing was “definitely on the table,” noting that firms approach Meta for access to models or spare compute “almost every week.”

The market read it as bearish for the picks-and-shovels trade. META closed down about 2% Friday after falling as much as 6% intraday. The PHLX Semiconductor Index dropped 11% on the week, its steepest one-week slide since March 2025, and now sits nearly 24% below its late-June all-time high. Strong forecasts from TSMC and ASML did nothing to arrest it.

“Valuations in semiconductor stocks had priced near-perfect demand,” said Toni Meadows, head of investment at BRI Wealth Management. What’s shifting isn’t the demand. It’s who captures the margin between the fab and the model.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.