Anthropic, OpenAI Hunt 20-30MW Data Center Slots in UK, Nordics

Anthropic and OpenAI are scouting for data center allocations of 20 to 30 megawatts in the United Kingdom and the Nordics, a step down from the multi-hundred-megawatt commitments the two labs have chased over the past year, CNBC reported on September 18, citing people familiar with the talks.

Four sources said Anthropic has sounded out sites in both regions. Two of them said OpenAI is focused on the Nordics. One said talks involving both companies about US deployments at that scale are also underway.

The rationale, per those sources, is speed: smaller allocations can bring usable compute online faster than multi-hundred-megawatt builds, especially for inference workloads that can run across separate chip clusters and sites. That last detail matters, because it says the geography of any single site is less binding than it would be for a training run.

"We're building a diversified compute portfolio to meet growing demand for AI around the world," an OpenAI spokesperson told the network. The Anthropic side of the story is a quieter chase for tens of megawatts alongside the roughly 460 megawatts and $45 billion the lab committed at Nscale's West Virginia campus last month. Nscale has been a running thread in our own AI infrastructure coverage, which the same day caught the cloud provider's $30 billion US IPO filing.

CNBC's report names no counterparties, no prices and no signed contracts.