By Naveen Athrappully
Major AI development company Anthropic announced a $50 billion investment to develop data center infrastructure in the United States, specifically Texas and New York, “with more sites to come,” according to a Nov. 12 statement from the company.
Anthropic has partnered with AI cloud platform Fluidstack for the latest investment. Fluidstack is headquartered in London, with main offices in New York and California. The expansion is expected to create approximately 800 permanent jobs and 2,400 construction jobs, and sites coming online throughout 2026.
“It will help advance the goals in the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan to maintain American AI leadership and strengthen domestic technology infrastructure,” said Anthropic. “We are proud to create good American jobs and bolster American competitiveness.”
“We’re getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren’t possible before. Realizing that potential requires infrastructure that can support continued development at the frontier,” said Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic. “These sites will help us build more capable AI systems that can drive those breakthroughs, while creating American jobs.”
President Donald Trump’s administration has supported investments tied to AI technologies and related infrastructure developments in the United States since he took office earlier this year, announcing several executive orders for maintaining U.S. domination in the industry.
The AI Action Plan is a set of policy goals by the administration based on three pillars: accelerating innovation, building AI infrastructure, and leading in international diplomacy and security.
“American energy capacity has stagnated since the 1970s while China has rapidly built out their grid. America’s path to AI dominance depends on changing this troubling trend,” according to the Action Plan.
Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude is one of the major players in the chatbot market, which is led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Based on OpenAI data, there are about 700 million weekly active users of ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, Anthropic serves more than 300,000 business customers. It has registered nearly sevenfold growth in the number of large accounts, customers that each represent more than $100,000 in run-rate revenue, according to the company.
While ChatGPT is used for more general purposes and daily tasks, Claude users come mostly from the programming and engineering sectors.
“The scale of this investment is necessary to meet the growing demand for Claude from hundreds of thousands of businesses,” said Anthropic.
AI Bubbles and Woes
Businesses in the artificial intelligence sector are blazing forward with rapid expansions, with almost all major companies announcing multibillion-dollar development plans.
In September, Microsoft, for example, partnered with Dutch-based Nebius AI cloud to procure dedicated infrastructure capacity.
On Nov. 11, Nebuis signed another deal with Meta for AI infrastructure. While the Microsoft partnership was worth around $17.4 billion, Meta’s was valued at $3 billion.
Meta said last week that its investment commitments in the United States, related to AI products and building personal superintelligence, were worth more than $600 billion.
Earlier this month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenAI announced a multiyear, strategic partnership worth $38 billion, under which OpenAI will gain access to AWS infrastructure comprising hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art NVIDIA GPUs, with the ability to further expand in the future.
Although data center infrastructure developments bring thousands of new job opportunities, there are certain key drawbacks to such rapid expansions.
Residents in locations with large data centers have complained about the extraordinarily high electricity usage in these regions, combined with atypical water consumption and noise from the facilities.
A common area of contention when a new data center crops up in a location is that state and local governments offer specific tax incentives to the tech companies, which are often shielded from public scrutiny through nondisclosure agreements, according to analysis by The Epoch Times.
While companies claim privacy of proprietary corporate intelligence, residents feel their voices are overlooked, and left wondering whether they had any choice in the matter.
With the rapid growth, there are also concerns about the AI investments mirroring an economic boom similar to the dotcom bubble of the 1990s.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell quelled some of the fears in a recent press conference, noting that AI growth has contributed to broader economic growth through investments in chips and data center infrastructure, which is different from the dotcom valuations.
Although AI shares are surging, price volatility has been a source of concern, compared to more established industries.
