Meta in talks to lease computing power to Anthropic in deal that may reach $10B
The social media giant's push into cloud hosting for AI models has massive implications for the compute economy that Bitcoin miners are already racing to join.
Meta is in advanced negotiations to offer private cloud instances of Anthropic’s Claude AI models in a deal estimated at around $10 billion over two years. The arrangement, first reported by SemiAnalysis on July 2, would effectively turn Meta into something resembling a cloud provider, hosting and serving a competitor’s AI models through its own infrastructure.
The structure reportedly mirrors what hyperscalers like Amazon Bedrock already offer: managed access to AI models through a cloud platform.
Meta’s neocloud ambitions and the numbers behind them
The context for this deal is Meta’s staggering investment in AI infrastructure. The company has planned capital expenditures in the range of $125 billion to $145 billion for 2026 alone.
With that kind of spending, you end up with a lot of compute capacity. Meta’s play here is to monetize the excess, entering what industry observers are calling the “neocloud” space. Rather than letting expensive GPUs sit idle between training runs, Meta would rent them out as managed AI hosting environments.
Bitcoin miners are already pivoting to this exact playbook
TeraWulf, a publicly traded Bitcoin mining company, signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic on July 6 worth approximately $19 billion. That deal covers an AI data center, meaning a company that built its business on proof-of-work mining is now betting its long-term future on hosting AI workloads.
CoreWeave, which started as a crypto mining operation before pivoting entirely to GPU cloud computing, has secured major partnerships with both Meta and Anthropic totaling $21 billion in 2026.
What this means for investors
For crypto-adjacent companies, the implications are concrete. TeraWulf’s $19 billion Anthropic lease dwarfs its Bitcoin mining revenue and represents a fundamental revaluation thesis for the company. If Bitcoin miners can credibly position themselves as AI infrastructure providers, their valuations start reflecting cloud computing multiples rather than commodity mining multiples.
The risk is concentration. These multi-billion-dollar deals create deep dependencies on a handful of AI companies. If Anthropic’s growth stalls, or if the broader AI spending cycle cools, companies that retooled their infrastructure around AI hosting could find themselves with expensive, underutilized facilities.