Anthropic is founding a new joint venture for data centers with the financial investor Macquarie Asset Management and the sovereign wealth fund GIC: Theseus Infrastructure. The platform is set to build data centers in the USA and lease them exclusively to Anthropic. The amount of money the three partners are investing is not disclosed.
Macquarie and GIC bear the construction risk
Theseus Infrastructure is being established as an independent platform that plans, builds, and operates data centers – and then leases the completed facilities long-term to Anthropic. According to the joint statement from Macquarie, funds managed by Macquarie Asset Management, together with the sovereign wealth fund GIC, will cover the majority of the required equity for each individual project. Anthropic itself acts as the anchor tenant and pays for the use of the capacity over the contract term, but does not build the facilities at its own expense. The model resembles leasing: instead of investing billions in its own construction projects, the AI company secures computing power through fixed rental contracts, while the investors bear the construction risk. Additionally, Anthropic commits to offsetting electricity price increases that local residents may face due to the construction and operation of the data centers. The three partners do not disclose how many locations are planned, what capacity they are expected to deliver in megawatts, or when the first groundbreaking will take place.
The deal is part of a series of capacity agreements
Theseus is already the third major computing power agreement that Anthropic has announced within a few weeks. In early August, the company reportedly secured computing power for ten billion dollars from the Norwegian startup Volta, which is building a data center in the town of Tydal for this purpose. Just a few days earlier, Anthropic, along with Google, Broadcom, Apollo, and Blackstone, had set up a credit structure worth around 200 billion dollars to gain access to Google’s computing chips – even though the company does not have its own credit rating. In July, the New York Times and Reuters reported that even Meta was negotiating a potential ten billion dollar deal with its direct competitor Anthropic. What all three agreements have in common is that Anthropic itself invests very little of its own capital, but rents computing power or secures it through third-party financing. Bloomberg places the Theseus initiative in a series with OpenAI’s Stargate program, which pursues a similar goal with a different financing structure.
The construction boom in AI data centers is accelerating
The Theseus deal is part of an industry-wide construction boom. The contract manufacturer TSMC reported a revenue increase of 45 percent for July, Intel recently raised 15 billion dollars in fresh capital, and Nvidia invested up to three billion dollars in the power supplier Lancium – investments primarily aimed at meeting the increasing energy demand of AI data centers. According to the partners’ statement, Theseus Infrastructure is expected to create thousands of construction and operational jobs in the respective regional locations, although they do not specify an exact number. Amazon and Microsoft are also currently expanding their own capacities, such as with a gas power plant in Texas and new servers in the Azure cloud, respectively. Unlike these projects, Anthropic does not take on construction or operation itself with Theseus, but only commits through rental contracts. For investors like Macquarie and GIC, who typically invest in infrastructure such as ports or power grids, AI data centers are thus becoming a new, predictable asset class with long-term cash flows.
It remains to be seen how large Theseus Infrastructure will actually become and whether the platform will also operate outside the USA in the future – for users in Germany and Europe, the deal currently has no direct relevance, as comparable Anthropic projects in Europe have so far been limited to individual initiatives like the Volta site in Norway. It will be crucial whether the leasing model proves to be more viable than the debt-based structures of recent months – or whether Anthropic ultimately needs both paths in parallel to keep pace with the computing power demand for Claude.
