Anthropic reportedly agrees $3.4bn deal for gas generators to power AI data centres

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Anthropic has agreed to pay about $3.4 billion to take over 1.7 gigawatts of gas-fired generator orders from OnePWR Solutions, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, in what the paper called the largest known single purchase of power-generation equipment by an AI lab. The agreement was signed in late September and covers Caterpillar generators that the San Antonio supplier ordered about two years ago but needed financing to complete.

The deal is for equipment and the capacity to install it, not for the company that ordered it. Anthropic is taking over OnePWR's existing Caterpillar orders and gaining the engineering and construction work needed to put the generators in place, but it has not bought OnePWR itself and none of the supplier's staff are moving to Anthropic. The generators are expected to become available soon and over the following two years, at roughly $2 million per megawatt of capacity.

The purchase fits what Anthropic has already told investors. In the prospectus for its planned Nasdaq listing, filed on October 26 and amended on November 2, the company says some of its planned data centre facilities will rely on dedicated on-site natural gas-fired generation, leaving it exposed to fuel price swings and supply disruptions outside its control. Its contracts generally pass fuel costs on without caps. In February, Anthropic promised to bring new power generation online to match its data centres' needs and to cover electricity price rises they cause, without saying what kind of power that would be.

This deal, as it stands, rests on a single report. The Financial Times cited a person familiar with the matter, and Reuters, reporting the agreement on November 8, said it could not independently verify the FT's account, with Anthropic and OnePWR declining to comment. No company has confirmed the transaction, and one figure in the report sits uneasily against the supplier's own record: OnePWR said in February that its whole equipment position totalled about 1.2 gigawatts, below the 1.7 gigawatts in the FT report, and nobody has yet reconciled the two. A transaction adviser, Piper Sandler, lists a September 2026 sale of OnePWR's power-generation platform worth $3.4 billion to an unnamed frontier AI lab, which matches the reported value and timing without naming Anthropic. What is solid is the context: the prospectus disclosure on gas-fired generation is quoted in the company's own filing, and two separate accounts of that filing describe the same passage.

Power equipment has become one of the tightest bottlenecks in the AI build-out, and Anthropic's own filing warns that generators and other equipment must be ordered years in advance, with turbines, generators, substations and transmission parts facing extended delivery times, price rises and rationing. Buying a place in Caterpillar's queue is a shortcut around that wait, and it fits a company whose amended filing puts its compute and infrastructure commitments at about $895 billion through 2045. But the generators burn a fossil fuel, and the filing itself flags shifting public and political views on climate change as a risk to its plans. The report lands days after voters backed limits on AI data centres in 40 of 41 local ballot measures in the midterms, and Texas and Georgia elected governors who had promised a pause.

What happens next depends on confirmation that has not yet come: whether Anthropic, OnePWR or Caterpillar acknowledges the deal or its figures, whether a later securities filing itemises the commitment, and where the 1.7 gigawatts end up. No site names, installation dates or air permits have been made public, and those documents, when they appear, will show whether the generators become working power for named data centres or remain orders on paper.