Anthropic announces $35 billion for 704 megawatts of compute in Texas

The figure circulating today in the trade press is $35 billion: the amount of the contract announced by Anthropic for 704 megawatts of computing capacity in south Texas. The capacity is supplied by Lambda, a company backed by Nvidia; the campus in Nueces County is being built by Hut 8, and the lease on the property is held by Nvidia, according to the daily roundup by The AI News Report and the daily index of AI Weekly.

A preliminary clarification on the nature of the data: the amount and the contracted power come from the buying company’s announcement, picked up by two trade roundups. There is currently no independent documentation on the financial terms of the deal — duration, payment deadlines, clauses — and no authority or third-party counterpart has confirmed them. They should be read as figures declared by the party involved, not as verified data.

The ratio between the two figures

Placed side by side, the two announced figures give an arithmetic ratio of about $50 million per megawatt of capacity. This is a basic calculation on the reported figures, not a market estimate: we do not know over how many years the commitment is spread nor exactly what it covers — energy, real estate, computing equipment, or a combination of the three.

The interesting detail is not so much the sum as the breakdown of roles. In a single deal, four distinct parties appear: the one buying the capacity, the one supplying it, the one building the site, and the one holding the lease on it. This is not a vertical supply chain but a chain of crossed contracts, in which the same chip maker appears both as backer of the supplier and as holder of the property lease.

Role	Party
Capacity buyer	Anthropic
Supplier	Lambda
Campus builder	Hut 8
Lease	Nvidia
Announced amount	$35 billion
Power	704 megawatts

The other move: Meta builds in-house

The same roundup includes a move of the opposite kind. Meta has begun production of its own artificial intelligence accelerator, designed together with Broadcom and manufactured by TSMC, as part of a stated path toward 7 gigawatts of computing capacity.

The two strategies differ in where the spending goes. In the first case, the buyer purchases capacity from third parties and pays for it as a service; in the second, the company brings in-house the most expensive component of the chain, the processor, reducing dependence on an outside supplier. Here too, the target power figure is a company statement.

What we don’t know

We do not know the planned power source for the Texas campus nor the timeline for going into operation. We do not know whether the $35 billion is a multi-year commitment already booked or a total contract value subject to conditions. The timeframe for the 7 gigawatts indicated by Meta is not known. Neither operation is currently accompanied by publicly accessible corporate documents in the available sources: what exists are the companies’ announcements and their coverage in the press.