On Wednesday, artificial intelligence firm Anthropic revealed a $50 billion commitment to computing infrastructure, which will encompass new data centers situated in Texas and New York.
TL;DR
- Anthropic is investing $50 billion in new data centers in Texas and New York for AI operations.
- This investment is expected to create 800 permanent jobs and 2,400 construction jobs.
- The move comes as AI companies heavily invest in energy-intensive infrastructure despite market and environmental concerns.
- Microsoft is also building a new data center in Atlanta, Georgia, to support AI advancements.
On Wednesday, Microsoft revealed plans for a new data center being built in Atlanta, Georgia. They stated it will link with a facility in Wisconsin, creating a “massive supercomputer” that utilizes hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips to support AI advancements.
Current offers indicate the tech sector is investing heavily in constructing energy-intensive AI infrastructure, even with ongoing financial worries about a market bubble, environmental considerations and the political effects concerning rapidly increasing utility costs in the areas where these facilities are being built.
Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, announced it's collaborating with Fluidstack, a London-based firm, to establish new computing infrastructure for its AI operations. The specific sites and the required power sources were not revealed.
TeraWulf, a company that develops cryptocurrency mining data centers, has previously announced its collaboration with Fluidstack on Google-supported data center initiatives in Texas and New York, specifically near Lake Ontario. TeraWulf chose not to comment on Wednesday.
A report last month from TD Cowen said that the leading cloud computing providers leased a “staggering” amount of U.S. Data center capacity in the third fiscal quarter of this year, amounting to more than 7.4 gigawatts of energy, more than all of last year combined.
Oracle secured the largest share of capacity then, largely to power AI tasks for OpenAI, Anthropic's main competitor and the creator of ChatGPT. Google ranked second, followed by Fluidstack in third place, preceding Meta, Amazon, CoreWeave, and Microsoft.
Anthropic stated its initiatives are projected to generate approximately 800 full-time positions and 2,400 roles in construction. The company mentioned in a declaration that the “scale of this investment is necessary to meet the growing demand for Claude from hundreds of thousands of businesses while keeping our research at the frontier.”
Microsoft has named its Atlanta data center Fairwater 2, following the initial Fairwater complex under construction near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The tech giant stated this facility will support its internal technologies, as well as those of OpenAI and other AI creators. Prior to a partnership amendment earlier this year, Microsoft served as OpenAI's sole cloud computing partner. Subsequently, OpenAI revealed infrastructure commitments exceeding $1 trillion, largely linked to its Stargate initiative with Collaborators Oracle and SoftBank.
Concerns about an AI investment bubble have been sparked by the tech industry's substantial expenditure on computing infrastructure for AI startups that have yet to achieve profitability.
Investors have closely watched a series of intertwined deals over recent months between top AI developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic and the companies building the costly computer chips and data centers needed to power their AI products. Anthropic said it will continue to “prioritize cost-effective, capital-efficient approaches” to scaling up its business.