OpenAI and Anthropic pursue mid-size and gigawatt data center deals

By Splitfeed EditorialLast updated Sep 26, 2026, 19:17 UTC

In the final week of September 2026, reporting from Data Center Dynamics, Yahoo Finance, and The Information described a two-track infrastructure push by OpenAI and Anthropic. Both companies are actively seeking 20 to 30 megawatt data center deployments to meet near-term compute needs while their larger gigawatt-scale projects fall behind schedule. At the same time, Anthropic has signed a lease for the first stage of a data center in Queensland, Australia, part of a planned $10.4 billion facility, and is separately in talks with Stream Data Centers for a lease of up to 1 gigawatt of capacity, a deal first reported by The Information.

The Stream discussions are particularly significant because they would give Anthropic direct access to large-scale compute without routing through major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud, with which it has existing partnerships. That would mark a meaningful shift in how the company controls its infrastructure costs and supply chain. The simultaneous pursuit of small, medium, and large deployments across multiple geographies suggests that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI can rely on any single project materialising on schedule, which raises questions about how reliably the industry can plan and execute the massive builds it has been announcing.

The pro-AI camp has not commented on this story yet, but would typically frame the infrastructure expansion as necessary investment that signals confidence in continued demand growth and long-term commercial viability. The anti-AI camp, by contrast, is focused on accountability: one account, bizarreman.bsky.social, called for holding OpenAI, Anthropic, and similar companies liable for their creations' actions, a framing that treats scale itself as a reason for greater legal exposure rather than a marker of progress. The middle ground camp has not reacted either, but would ordinarily press for transparency around energy consumption, grid impact, and whether the governance structures keeping pace with the physical buildout.

The deal to watch is whether Anthropic formally closes its agreement with Stream Data Centers and on what terms, since the size and structure of that lease would clarify how seriously the company intends to reduce its dependence on cloud partners. The Queensland facility's subsequent construction phases and OpenAI's progress on its larger gigawatt projects would also indicate whether the industry's scheduling problems are a temporary lag or a more persistent constraint.