Anthropic pays $3.4 billion to jump the queue for gas generators to power its AI

For the companies building artificial intelligence, a heavy-duty generator that can be delivered soon has become as hard to find as a top-end chip. Anthropic has just bought a whole line of them. The Claude maker has taken over gas-fired generator orders that a Texas equipment supplier had already placed with Caterpillar, the Financial Times reported, in what the newspaper called the largest known single purchase of power-generation equipment by an AI lab.

The deal shows where the AI race is now being fought. Technology companies used to buy electricity much as households do, from utilities and specialist power developers, and left the turbines, permits and transmission lines to someone else. Anthropic skipped that layer. Instead of waiting to become a customer of the supplier, it bought the supplier’s place in the queue, and a company best known for a chatbot and coding agents now controls a fleet of gas engines on order.

According to the FT, which cited a person familiar with the matter, Anthropic agreed in late September to pay $3.4 billion for commitments covering 1.7 gigawatts of large generators from OnePWR Solutions, an equipment supplier based in San Antonio. OnePWR had placed those orders with Caterpillar about two years ago. Anthropic first planned to buy power from OnePWR, then chose to take over the generator orders instead, together with the engineering and construction capability needed to install the machines. It did not buy the company, and no OnePWR staff moved across. Both companies declined to comment to the newspaper.

What Anthropic paid for is time. Demand for gas turbines and large generators has outrun factory capacity as AI developers race to build data centres, and fresh orders now face long manufacturing waits. Orders already sitting in Caterpillar’s production schedule give Anthropic machines that can arrive in the near term and over the next two years. For scale, 1.7 gigawatts is more than the output of any single large nuclear reactor.

Rivals got there first, if not at this size. Elon Musk‘s xAI brought in its own gas turbines to run its Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, and Alphabet agreed last year to buy Intersect, a developer of power projects for data centres. Anthropic’s own bills explain the urgency. Its IPO prospectus, made public last month, listed roughly $417 billion in minimum payments on compute and data-centre deals signed or amended since the end of 2025, and the GPU capacity it rents from SpaceX’s AI unit is expected to cost around $3.1 billion a month once fully delivered. Chips in a building without power earn nothing, and every one of those contracts assumes the electricity arrives on time.

MCM’s reading of that filing in October centred on Dario Amodei‘s warning that misjudging the timing of AI revenue by a single year could bankrupt the company. Generators are a different kind of bet from compute contracts. Some rental deals can be cancelled on notice, while a gas engine is a physical asset, and in a market this short of equipment it is one that other buyers would happily take off Anthropic’s hands.

The report left several questions open. It did not say where the generators will run, whether they will feed data centres directly or back up grid connections, or how much gas they will burn. Gas-fired supply also adds emissions at a time when the large AI developers have promoted wind, solar and nuclear deals as the way they intend to power their models.

OnePWR ordered those engines to sell electricity to customers like Anthropic. Anthropic decided it would rather own the engines.

Tags: Anthropic, AI infrastructure, AI data centers, Caterpillar, gas generators, OnePWR Solutions