Markets META -0.02% JUL 20, 2026

Meta in early talks to lease Anthropic up to $10B of compute over two years

The NYT-first-reported deal would turn Meta's $145B capex build into a revenue line and pit it against CoreWeave and Nebius.

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, according to a New York Times report first surfaced on July 17 and matched by CNBC, Bloomberg News and Reuters. META closed down more than 2% that session and drifted marginally lower after the bell.

The structural read is straightforward. Meta has guided to as much as $145 billion of capex in 2026. A deal to rent that infrastructure to a frontier lab converts a balance-sheet build into a revenue line, and it does so with the counterparty that most needs the electrons. Per a Reuters source, Anthropic proposed the arrangement in June, would pay in monthly increments, and either side could exit early. Both companies declined to comment.

The awkward part: Meta doesn’t currently operate a compute-selling business. That’s changing quickly. Bloomberg reported earlier in July that Meta was already standing up a cloud operation to sell excess capacity and host models for developers, framing it as “an opportunity for the social media giant to build a new business around its heavy investment in AI infrastructure.” Dave Brown, previously a senior AWS executive, is joining. At the May shareholder meeting, Mark Zuckerberg called entering cloud computing “definitely on the table,” and said firms approach Meta “almost every week.” Back in October he was more explicit, describing counterparties “asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we’ve bought it at.”

That premium is the whole game. It also drops Meta into the same fairway as CoreWeave and Nebius, an odd posture given Meta is itself a CoreWeave customer: the two disclosed an expanded $21 billion agreement on April 9 running through December 2032, with initial deployments of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, per CoreWeave’s 8-K.

Anthropic, for its part, agreed in May to tap the full capacity of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 site in Memphis. The lab is now sourcing from whoever has racks powered. ServiceNow reports fiscal Q2 on July 22, the next read on how far that demand travels down the enterprise stack.

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.