Anthropic and OpenAI seek smaller data center deals as race for AI capacity accelerates, sources say

Anthropic and OpenAI are pursuing compute capacity deals for much smaller deployments of 20-30 megawatts, in addition to the multi-hundred-megawatt and gigawatt facilities they have agreed over the past year, sources told CNBC. Anthropic has explored agreements of that size in the U.K. and the Nordics, while OpenAI has examined similar deployments in the Nordics, with talks also reported about U.S. capacity at that scale. Smaller allocations let the companies deploy workloads faster amid the AI boom; an OpenAI spokesperson said it is "building a diversified compute portfolio."