Meta Shelves Plan to Rent Compute to Anthropic as In-House Model Demand Grows

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Meta has shelved plans to lease AI compute capacity to Anthropic. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei earlier this year personally called Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang to inquire about renting AI compute chips from the rival company.

After internal discussions, Meta decided not to provide the compute capacity for now, according to the report. The company's own demand for compute has grown rapidly as its self-developed Muse series of models began rolling out, reviving its AI business after an earlier downturn. Supplying compute to a competitor at this stage could be seen as helping an adversary.

The report also noted that compute allocation is influencing career choices among AI talent, citing Noam Shazeer, a core contributor to the Transformer architecture, whose second departure from Google was linked to insufficient compute. It added that many promised compute buildouts have failed to materialize, constraining the development of the AI industry.