With the clock counting down to Anthropic's highly anticipated Wall Street debut, where Dario Amodei hopes to dethrone SpaceX as the biggest IPO in history… the company is making sure it has enough electricity to support those ambitions.

And it's willing to spend $3.4 BILLION to get it.

According to reports, Anthropic purchased commitments for 1.7 gigawatts of heavy-duty power generators from OnePWR Solutions, a San Antonio-based equipment supplier.

The agreement, reached in late September, represents the largest known single purchase of power-generation equipment by an AI company.

And it's another sign of just how far the industry's biggest players are willing to go to secure electricity for their fast expanding data centers.

Rather than waiting for utilities to build new capacity, Anthropic is taking matters into its own hands.

So why exactly is one of the world's most valuable AI startups suddenly spending billions on natural gas generators?

Well, it turns out the AI boom has created a rather expensive problem.

Technology companies are pouring hundreds of billions into data centers packed with increasingly powerful Nvidia chips.

But all those chips need electricity.

And securing enough of it has become one of the industry's biggest problems.

Demand for industrial generators and gas turbines has surged, leaving manufacturers struggling to keep up and delivery times stretching years into the future.

Which means even companies with billions to spend can't necessarily get their hands on the equipment they need.

But Anthropic appears to have found a pretty clever workaround.

According to the Financial Times, OnePWR originally ordered the Caterpillar generators two years ago, before equipment prices surged.

There was just one problem.

The supplier needed additional financing to complete the transaction.

Anthropic initially planned to become a OnePWR customer before deciding to take over its existing equipment orders instead.

In other words, Anthropic essentially bought someone else's place in line.

The arrangement gives Anthropic access to generators expected to become available in the near term and over the next two years, rather than waiting for entirely new orders.

And the amount of electricity involved is substantial.

At 1.7 gigawatts, the equipment could theoretically generate enough electricity to supply 1.3 million average American homes.

But Anthropic isn't the only technology company suddenly developing an interest in the energy business.

Elon Musk's SpaceX, which owns xAI, reportedly purchased approximately $2 billion worth of mobile gas turbines earlier this year to bring its massive data centers online faster.

Meanwhile, Google's parent company, Alphabet, acquired energy developer Intersect in late 2025 to secure additional electricity infrastructure.

And for Anthropic, the stakes are especially high.

The company recently disclosed nearly $900 BILLION in computing commitments through 2045, reflecting the enormous investments needed to support growing demand for its Claude models.

Reuters also reported in September that Anthropic expects to spend more than $500 billion over the next decade building AI infrastructure.

That's half a trillion dollars in just ten years.

And until now, Anthropic has relied heavily on outside partners to secure computing capacity, electricity, land, and data centers.

Those arrangements have helped the company expand quickly, but they've also left it dependent on third parties competing for the same limited resources.

Meanwhile, Anthropic is already a major customer of SpaceX's computing operations, with monthly payments for leased capacity reportedly expected to reach $3.1 BILLION by year-end.

At that level, payments would exceed $37 billion annually if sustained.

And when you're spending that kind of money on computing capacity, the last thing you want is a multibillion-dollar data center sitting idle because the power equipment hasn't arrived.

Of course, Anthropic still needs to install the equipment, secure fuel supplies, and bring everything online.

But with its Wall Street debut approaching and nearly $900 billion in computing commitments ahead, the company isn't taking any chances.

After all, it's hard to convince investors you're building the future of artificial intelligence when you're still waiting on the electric company.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Alphabet as mentioned in the article.