Anthropic has agreed to pay about $3.4 billion for gas-fired power generators that another company had already ordered, the Financial Times reported on Nov. 8. If accurate, it would be the largest known single purchase of power equipment by an AI company. Neither Anthropic nor the seller has confirmed it.
What Was Reported
According to the FT, as relayed by The Next Web and VKTR, the deal covers 1.7 gigawatts of large generators made by Caterpillar. The seller is OnePWR Solutions, a Texas power supplier that ordered the machines about two years ago but needed money to complete the purchase. Anthropic first planned to buy electricity from OnePWR. It instead took over the equipment orders and the engineering and construction work to install them.
Anthropic did not buy OnePWR itself. The report did not say where the generators will go. Both companies declined to comment to the FT.
Why It Matters for Your Money
The price works out to about $2 million per megawatt. More important is the timing: the generators were ordered before equipment prices climbed, and will arrive over the next couple of years, according to VKTR’s analysis. New orders face long manufacturing backlogs.
That backlog is visible in Caterpillar’s own numbers. VKTR cites the company’s third-quarter results: power generation sales up 30% to $3.42 billion, driven by data center demand, with a record order backlog. Power, not just chips, is now a bottleneck, and AI companies are spending billions to get ahead of it.
It follows a pattern of enormous infrastructure bets. VKTR lists xAI’s roughly $2 billion of mobile gas turbines and Alphabet’s $4.75 billion deal for energy developer Intersect. For ordinary investors, the takeaway is that AI spending is spreading from chips into utilities, equipment makers and fuel supply. For utility customers, it’s a reminder that data centers are competing for power.
The Catch
Everything here rests on one FT report quoting a person familiar with the deal. VKTR also points to a Piper Sandler listing of a $3.4 billion sale of a power generation platform to an unnamed “frontier AI lab,” which fits but doesn’t name the buyer. On-site gas also brings risks: fuel prices, air permits and local pushback. For how investors are weighing that kind of outlay, see Amazon’s $220 billion plan.
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