The New York Times / CNBC
Jul 18, 2026
bullish
Anthropic in Talks to Lease ~$10B in Compute from Meta Over Two Years
Anthropic approached Meta in June 2026 about leasing GPU capacity worth up to $10 billion over two years, according to reporting by the New York Times and CNBC. The deal would give Anthropic access to Meta's massive accelerator fleet — built under a 2026 capex plan of $125–145 billion — as a third major supply source alongside committed agreements with AWS and SpaceX. The talks signal continued extreme demand pressure at the frontier-model layer, with Anthropic citing persistent GPU bottlenecks that force it to cap interactions on its most advanced Claude models.
Both index legs softened over the trailing 10 days — the H100 Neo-Cloud (SDH100RT) slipping 1.4% to $2.74/hr and the B200 Neo-Cloud (SDB200RT) falling 0.7% to $5.61/hr — consistent with near-term spot-market softness on both generations. The 30-day picture diverges sharply: H100 is up 3.0%, suggesting sustained baseline demand for proven Hopper capacity, while B200 has shed 6.7%, reflecting early Blackwell rollout pricing pressure as more supply comes online and buyers resist the premium over a maturing H100 market. Structural demand signals remain firmly bullish beneath the surface: GPU procurement lead times of 36–52 weeks and record-low data-center vacancy rates of 1.6% in North America indicate that spot softness is a pricing-layer phenomenon, not a demand collapse. Frontier labs are aggressively locking in capacity across multiple providers simultaneously, underscoring that the binding constraint in the market remains supply, not appetite.