Anthropic has agreed to pay about $3.4 billion to secure gas-fired generators for its data centres, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, in the latest sign of how far artificial intelligence companies will go to lock down the electricity behind their expansion.
The deal covers commitments for 1.7 gigawatts of heavy-duty generators, ordered through OnePWR Solutions, a San Antonio-based company that builds microgrids and on-site power plants. Anthropic struck the agreement in late September, taking over orders OnePWR had placed with Caterpillar about two years earlier but needed financing to complete.
Anthropic did not buy OnePWR itself, and none of the supplier’s employees are moving to the AI company. The package does include the engineering and construction capacity needed to install the machines. The Financial Times described it as the largest known single purchase of power-generation equipment by an AI laboratory.
The report does not say where the generators will be installed or which data centres they will serve. That matters, because the machines are not fresh orders: they are a place in a queue that someone else had already taken, and Anthropic is paying to step into it.
The purchase fits the picture Anthropic has set out to investors ahead of its planned stock market listing. In its prospectus, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 26 October and amended on 2 November, the company disclosed about $895 billion in combined purchase and lease commitments, mostly for computing capacity and infrastructure. Its own filing warns that generators, turbines, substations and other equipment “must be ordered years in advance” and have faced long delivery times, price rises and rationing as data centre operators compete for them.
Anthropic had already signalled the direction of travel in February, when it committed to pay for all of the grid upgrades needed to connect its data centres and to bring new power generation online to match their electricity needs. The generator deal turns that pledge into hardware.
The timing is striking. Anthropic is pushing ahead with its listing before Thanksgiving, with the Financial Times reporting on Saturday that investors expect a valuation near $1.5 trillion. The company behind the Claude family of models has become one of the fastest-growing businesses in the history of the technology industry, and its biggest constraint is no longer demand for its products but the power to run them.
Note: this story rests on a single report. The Financial Times cited a person familiar with the matter, and Reuters, which also reported the deal, said it could not independently verify the account. Anthropic, OnePWR Solutions and Caterpillar have not commented publicly.
Sources: Financial Times (via Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/anthropic-secures-34-billion-generator-deal-ai-data-centers-ft-reports-2026-11-08/); Anthropic, Form S-1/A (US Securities and Exchange Commission, 2 November 2026).
