Meta shelves plan to rent AI computing power to Anthropic

AI computing power has become a key resource that big tech companies compete for. How it is shared can shape both industry competition and talent moves.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang earlier this year, hoping to rent AI chips from his rival. After internal talks, Meta finally decided not to lease the computing power.

With the rollout of its own Muse models, Meta's AI business has quickly bounced back from an earlier slump. Its computing needs are growing fast, so selling power to a rival would be like helping the competition.

The report also says computing power affects where AI talent chooses to work. Noam Shazeer, a core author of the Transformer architecture, left Google a second time partly over a lack of computing power. Many big computing buildout promises have also fallen through, holding back the AI industry.