Anthropic booked $517 billion of compute after warning rivals

Anthropic has signed compute contracts worth up to $517 billion in eleven months, The Decoder reports from The Information's figures. Since October 2025 the company has locked in at least 14.8 gigawatts on top of the one to two it already ran, and it is planning data centers of its own.

Dario Amodei spent early 2026 warning that his competitors were moving too fast.

“They don't really understand the risks they're taking.”

— Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, The Decoder, 8 September 2026

Quote source: Dario Amodei, early 2026, via The Decoder

Eight years of revenue, or thirty data centers

Anthropic's annualized revenue passed $65 billion, according to Bloomberg. Divide $517 billion by that and the contracts run to roughly eight years of everything the company currently earns, before costs, salaries or research.

Gigawatts are easier to picture than dollars. The Lake Mariner campus in New York, which we wrote about this morning, will draw up to 500 megawatts when finished, and Anthropic is one of its customers. The 14.8 gigawatts booked since October come to about thirty of those.

One line item in that total is public. TeraWulf announced a twenty-year, $19 billion lease with Anthropic for a Kentucky site on 6 July, which accounts for under 4% of the whole commitment.

Anthropic compute deals next to OpenAI

OpenAI is targeting 30 gigawatts by 2030, so Anthropic's booked capacity still trails it. The comparison is looser than it looks, because many of Anthropic's contracts run well past 2030 and OpenAI's target has a date on it.

Neither company covers these commitments from revenue. OpenAI was above $40 billion annualized as of July, against Anthropic's $65 billion, and both numbers sit far below what either has agreed to spend.

The warning changed hands

Amodei said in early 2026 that rivals investing too fast did not understand the risks they were taking. Eleven months of contracts later, Anthropic holds the larger revenue base and the faster procurement schedule.

Sam Altman now occupies the cautious position. He has warned about unsustainable silliness among neo-cloud providers, arguing that technical progress could turn today's expensive hardware commitments into bad bets. The chief executive who was warned about is now doing the warning.

Both arguments can hold at once. Compute bought today gets cheaper per unit of work every year, so a twenty-year lease signed at 2026 prices looks worse each year unless demand grows faster than efficiency does. That is the bet, and $517 billion is the size of it.

Watch the contract lengths rather than the headline number. A commitment that ends in 2029 is a forecast about demand. One that ends in 2046 is a forecast about the entire industry, and clusters of 160,000 chips are being ordered on the strength of it.

Nothing here should be taken as financial advice; treat it as information to consider.