Anthropic agreed in late September to pay $3.4 billion for 1.7 gigawatts of gas-fired generators to power its data centers off the grid, the largest known purchase of power equipment by an AI lab, according to the Financial Times. The generators come from Caterpillar orders that OnePWR Solutions, a San Antonio company that builds on-site power plants, placed about two years ago but couldn’t pay for. Anthropic, which hasn’t confirmed the deal, had planned to buy power from OnePWR as a customer and instead took over those orders, along with the engineering and construction work to install them, without buying the company or hiring its staff. That gets Anthropic engines priced before costs went up, with power coming online soon and through the next two years.
