Inside Anthropic’s Hunt for A.I. Computing Power

Late last year, Anthropic’s executives were in a bind. Their company, which was growing like a weed, was running out of computing power for artificial intelligence.

The amount of computing power that was needed became a “cone of uncertainty,” Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, said at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit in December. “Because the cone is so wide,” he added, “it’s hard to avoid making a mistake.”

The realization sent Anthropic on an all-out effort to obtain more computing power. In the ensuing months, the San Francisco company embarked on a deal spree, according to 14 people with knowledge of the A.I. lab, investors and industry experts.

Anthropic has since signed dozens of contracts with former cryptocurrency miners, data center start-ups, chipmakers and tech giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and SpaceX to secure enough computing power. It hired experts in data centers, which are the enormous computing sites powering A.I., and bought data center equipment to speed up construction. It met with developers and explored converting old coal plants and factories into data centers. And it considered deals for tiny amounts of computing power that could add up to what it needs.

“Anthropic is gobbling up a lot of the capacity,” said Erik Bernhardsson, the chief executive of Modal, a New York company that sells computing power.

Anthropic’s pursuit of computing power, some details of which have not been previously reported, is critical as it tries to lead in A.I. and conduct what could be the largest-ever initial public offering this month. The company needs computing power to develop cutting-edge A.I. models and to deliver products, like the Claude chatbot, to businesses and consumers. The resource is so vital that Anthropic spent more than 10 pages of its public offering prospectus detailing the stakes.