Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) is reportedly in early discussions with Anthropic over a compute lease agreement worth up to $10 billion spanning two years.
No official announcements have been made, and neither company has confirmed the talks, which were attributed to an unnamed source describing them as early-stage conversations.
The potential deal has stirred concern among neocloud investors, who are watching Meta’s ambitions in cloud infrastructure grow alongside its massive data center expansion.
Meta is already constructing a 5-gigawatt data center in Louisiana and continues to acquire computing hardware at a significant pace to support its AI development efforts.
Despite its building spree, Meta still depends heavily on external compute providers, as evidenced by its recently signed five-year, $27 billion deal with Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS).
In January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a Threads post that Meta expects to build tens of gigawatts of AI infrastructure this decade, with “hundreds of gigawatts or more over time.”
Meta also closed Q1 2026 with 3.56 billion daily active users across its social networks, meaning its internal compute demands remain among the highest of any company on the planet.
The question facing investors is whether Meta can transition from being one of the largest compute buyers to becoming a meaningful compute seller without cannibalizing its own operational needs.
Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT) recently expanded an existing contract with a “high-investment-grade tenant,” locking in a 15-year deal covering 352 megawatts with a total contract value of $9.8 billion, averaging $653 million per year.
Hut 8’s 1-gigawatt Beacon Point AI data center is poised to generate more than $1.75 billion in net operating income from its existing contracts alone.
Whether or not Meta is the unnamed tenant in that Hut 8 deal, the agreement signals that companies requiring AI compute are not waiting around for Meta to build out its cloud segment.
Iren (NASDAQ: IREN) offers another data point, announcing this week that it had secured $2.8 billion in new customer contracts with “leading AI developers,” with an average contract length of four years.
Iren now counts 10 customers, including a new unnamed leading AI developer, and raised its 2026 annual recurring revenue target to over $4 billion.
The more pessimistic scenario for neocloud providers is that Meta and other hyperscalers eventually build sufficient capacity to stop purchasing compute externally, potentially leaving contracts with firms like Nebius or CoreWeave unrenewed.
However, neoclouds have shown the ability to secure commitments one to two years in advance, giving them time to replace hyperscaler contracts with agreements from AI developers and other emerging customers before existing deals expire.
