Inside Anthropic’s race to secure international AI data centers
Anthropic is racing to expand AI computing capacity in the Asia-Pacific region as it tries to meet growing demand for its products.
The US-based AI lab is currently hiring for 13 roles in its computing department, eight of which are in Australia or Japan, focusing on the development and management of AI data centres.
In Japan, the company is hiring for two roles: data center engagement enabler and data center electrical engineer. All six open roles based in Australia focus on data center engineers and operators. In April, Anthropic was also hiring for a data center deal sourcing role in the country.
Anthropic, the world’s most valuable private company, announced a series of U.S.-based data center deals in the spring and was hiring for a role negotiating computing capacity in Europe in April.
As the use of corporate and consumer products has gained momentum in recent months, it is increasingly looking to expand abroad.
“Growth at this pace puts inevitable pressure on our infrastructure; in particular, our unprecedented consumer growth has impacted reliability and performance,” the company said in an April blog post. he said.
‘Plenty of energy’
Despite all the negativities, Anthropic continued its groundbreaking growth pace. Tensions continued with the US administration over the use of AI models.
The AI lab raised $65 billion in May at a $965 billion valuation. That figure topped $47 billion that month, Anthropic said, many times higher than the “around $9 billion” figure it said was by the end of 2025.
As part of the race to build computing capacity, a listing for a data center energy role in Australia specifically mentions the company’s “rapidly expanding AI computing footprint across the region” and mentions leading “hundreds of megawatts of acquisition efforts.”
David Wroe, head of the Artificial Intelligence and Security Program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tank, said Australia had excess land, abundant renewable energy potential and a stable political and regulatory environment.
The country also “keeps its distance from military threats, which have proven to be a major vulnerability for the Gulf states,” he told CNBC. Conflicts in the Middle East have tested the region’s credentials as a safe place to build AI infrastructure. Amazon data centers were targeted early in the war.
Wroe added that Australia’s involvement in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partnership with the US means the country is seen as a safe target for computing, even as models become more powerful and sensitive as national security assets.
But Wroe said the “main obstacle” to building a large-scale AI infrastructure in Australia was copyright laws, which “put an AI company at risk of being sued by rights holders”. Some politicians in Australia campaign against Copyright regulations for AI companies that want to use content to train commercial products.
quest for power
Anthropic pointed to statements made by CNBC in May, in which the company said it would increase international capacity.
“We are very intentional about where we add capacity, partnering with democratic countries whose legal and regulatory frameworks support investments of this scale, and where the supply chain (hardware, network, and facilities) our computing depends on will be secure,” Anthropic said in a blog post.
While roles in Australia and Japan do not have salary ranges, a European sourcing role for a London-based data center deal the company hired in April was offering a salary of between £225,000 and £270,000 ($296,854 – $355,253).
Engineering and technical roles in data centers are particularly in demand. labor shortages and rising salaries for these roles.
According to the Anthropic job posting, Japan has a thriving grid infrastructure and the government has significant interest in domestic AI infrastructure. The US AI lab isn’t the only company showing interest in investing in the region.
in April Microsoft It has announced a $10 billion investment in Japan, including the development of AI infrastructure, and GMI Cloud announced a $12 billion standalone AI project in March.
“Japan is a particularly attractive place to invest in Asia due to its political stability, reliable power grid, highly developed Internet and undersea cable infrastructure, and technically skilled workforce.” he said. Aalok Mehta is director of the Wadhwani Center for Artificial Intelligence at the think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“In many ways, this reflects the factors driving so much data center investment in the United States.”
Like projects around the world, AI infrastructure in Japan still faces critical challenges in accessing energy.
For many data center developers in the Asia-Pacific, “securing power is becoming more difficult than securing land, financing or permits,” said Xiaonan Feng, principal analyst for APAC power and renewable energy at Wood Mackenzie. “Network availability emerges as the decisive constraint on data center growth.”
