Anthropic has secured 1.7 gigawatts of gas-fired generators for $3.4 billion. The Financial Times reported the deal on Sunday, based on its own reporting and one person who knows about it. It was signed back in late September with OnePWR Solutions, a power supplier in San Antonio, Texas. As far as anyone knows, that makes it the largest purchase of its kind by an AI lab so far.
The route to it is the interesting part. OnePWR had ordered the generators from Caterpillar roughly two years ago but did not have the money to complete the purchase. Anthropic originally planned to buy power from OnePWR. Instead it took over the orders, along with the work of installing the machines.
What changed hands were orders, not a company
Anthropic did not acquire OnePWR, and no staff moved across. Where the generators will end up running has not been settled — at least not publicly. Both companies declined to comment to the FT, and neither responded immediately when Bloomberg followed up.
For scale: 1.7 gigawatts is roughly the output of a large nuclear plant. Gas generators deliver it less efficiently, but quickly and without waiting for a grid connection. That is the whole point. Anyone trying to build a data center in the US today waits years for grid capacity.
The timing lands in the middle of the IPO
A week before the planned Nasdaq debut, the deal fits a picture the amended S-1 already paints: $895 billion in compute commitments, almost all of it compute and infrastructure. The generators are a small but unusually tangible line in that: machines Anthropic owns, rather than compute time in somebody else’s cloud.
Anthropic is not alone on this path. Elon Musk’s xAI is in court over the gas turbines at its Memphis site. Gas is available fast, and it puts exhaust into residential neighborhoods — that is the conflict the industry buys along with the shortcut. After last week’s ballot measures, where opponents won 40 of 41 data center votes, it is no longer a side issue.
What I find striking is the role swap. A model provider is buying power-plant hardware on the secondary market because the primary market is sold out. Two years ago you would have assumed a typo.