Anthropic agreed to pay $3.4 billion for commitments covering 1.7 gigawatts of heavy-duty generators in late September, a deal with San Antonio-based OnePWR Solutions that stands as the largest known single purchase of power-generation equipment by an AI lab. The company did not buy OnePWR itself, but it walked away with engineering and construction capabilities needed to actually install the machines, plus a surprise: Caterpillar equipment orders that OnePWR had already placed.
How the Deal Came Together
According to the Financial Times, Anthropic originally planned simply to become a OnePWR customer, buying power generated by the San Antonio supplier's equipment. Instead, the company opted to take over OnePWR's equipment orders from Caterpillar directly, a shift that put Anthropic in the business of owning the hardware rather than purchasing the power it produces. A person familiar with the matter told the Financial Times that none of OnePWR's employees transferred over to Anthropic as part of the arrangement.
The scale of the purchase underscores just how urgently AI companies are chasing electricity. As Bloomberg notes in its reporting on the Financial Times findings, the transaction came to light alongside Anthropic's disclosure that it holds nearly $900 billion in computing commitments stretching through 2045 — a staggering figure that frames the generator buy as one piece of a much larger infrastructure bet.
Cutting Out the Middleman
The Financial Times frames the move as part of a broader pattern: AI companies are using their financial muscle to cut out intermediaries and take direct control of production rather than wait in line for conventional power contracts.
Caterpillar, meanwhile, has separately landed a 2-gigawatt equipment order for American Intelligence & Power's Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia, with potential to expand to 6 gigawatts, according to Power Engineering.
Why the Rush for On-Site Power
The scramble reflects a supply crunch that is reshaping how data centers get built. Data-center builders have increasingly turned to private, behind-the-meter power facilities specifically to bypass lengthy grid connection times, according to WIRED, which also reports that U.S. gas projects developed exclusively for data centers jumped from 97 gigawatts at the end of 2025 to more than 189 gigawatts by mid-2026. WIRED cautions that not every project tracked by Global Energy Monitor will ultimately get built.
The demand curve backs up the urgency. Goldman Sachs Research forecasts that U.S. data-center power demand will more than double, climbing from 31 gigawatts in 2025 to 66 gigawatts in 2027, and the firm estimates that only about 50 to 60 percent of data-center capacity scheduled for the next one to two years is likely to come online on time. Pew Research Center reports that U.S. data centers already consumed an estimated 183 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024 — more than 4 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption — with natural gas supplying over 40 percent of that power.
Utility Dive reports that more than 7.5 gigawatts of data-center projects with on-site generation are already under construction nationally, with another 60-plus gigawatts in pre-construction. Large-frame turbine delivery slots are increasingly booked years in advance. Against that backdrop, Anthropic's willingness to absorb engineering and construction capabilities, rather than simply wait for turbines to ship, looks less like a one-off and more like a preview of how AI labs intend to secure power for years to come.
