Anthropic buys $3.4 billion in natural gas turbines amid AI power crunch

Anthropic's first big bet on energy hardware

Anthropic is spending $3.4 billion on natural gas turbines, according to a Financial Times report covered by TechCrunch. The Caterpillar-built generators can produce up to 1.7 gigawatts of electricity. The purchase is a sharp departure for an AI company that has consistently preferred renting computing capacity to owning physical assets.

From renting to owning

That preference for renting is on record in Anthropic's own paperwork. In the S-1 filing it submitted in May ahead of a planned stock market listing this year, the company disclosed that it pays xAI, which TechCrunch identifies as a SpaceX subsidiary, $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for access to xAI's computing power. The filing also signalled that more compute-rental deals of this kind are expected.

How the purchase came together

The turbines were not simply ordered new. According to the Financial Times, equipment supplier OnePWR placed the order with Caterpillar a couple of years ago but could not line up financing to complete it. Anthropic had intended to buy the units through OnePWR but ended up going straight to the manufacturer instead.

TechCrunch notes that it is unclear why OnePWR failed to secure financing despite Anthropic's apparent interest as a customer. The report's suggested explanation is that Anthropic wanted the generating capacity for itself, denying a competitor the chance to take it.

Scarcity drove the decision

The backdrop is a power market that has tightened as quickly as AI demand for compute has grown. Backlogs for natural gas turbine orders now stretch into the early 2030s, and queues to connect new sites to the electrical grid can be equally long. TechCrunch characterises the purchase as something close to a last resort for a company that cannot afford to wait years for capacity.

An industry-wide turn to gas

Anthropic is joining a wider movement. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have all announced plans to build large natural gas plants to power their data centers on site rather than drawing from the public grid. That demand has boosted fracking, a drilling method that extracts gas trapped in underground rock, and if the buildout proceeds as planned, U.S. data centers on their own could burn more natural gas than Germany and Japan combined by 2035.

The strategy carries financial risk as well. One analyst cited by TechCrunch expects natural gas prices could more than triple by the end of the decade in some markets, a scenario that could leave Anthropic regretting the purchase.

Why it matters

The deal shows how severe the AI industry's electricity problem has become. Labs and cloud providers whose core business is software are being pushed into owning generation equipment, tying up capital in physical assets and exposing themselves to a volatile commodity. For Anthropic, which is preparing to go public, the $3.4 billion outlay marks a shift away from the flexible, rental-based compute model described in its S-1. It also signals that turbine capacity itself has become strategically contested, worth locking down partly to keep it away from rivals. And if gas-fired data center construction continues at this pace, the AI boom's energy footprint, and everyone's exposure to gas prices, will grow with it.