Anthropic Says It's Building Its Own Data Centers. Bloom Energy Sells Exactly the Onsite Power That Requires.

Via a brief news release on Oct. 26, Anthropic said that it had filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding its upcoming initial public offering (IPO).

There's not much detail on the release, but the prospectus with the SEC shows that the San Francisco-based company that developed the AI chatbot Claude sees a five-year power bottleneck. The company is moving from a cloud-only, fixed-time compute model to a hybrid setup that includes directly leased chips hosted in data center facilities.

In the prospectus, Anthropic discusses launching a new initiative, "Anthropic Direct," to build its own dedicated data centers rather than relying entirely on third-party cloud providers. The company expects this move to lower its long-term costs. Partner companies will buy the land, secure power, build the facilities, and run the daily operations. Anthropic will then lease the computing power directly from those partners. Last month, Anthropic began signing these agreements, committing to $125.2 billion in lease payments over five years, before interest.

Anthropic is likely to use behind-the-meter power generation for its data centers to accelerate its development.

Image source: Getty Images.

How Bloom Energy could benefit

Bloom Energy (NYSE: BE) provides an alternative to drawing power from a centralized electrical grid through on-site solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) technology. The energy company's SOFCs provide continuous low-emission electrical power.

Instead of waiting for a power grid to ramp up to power an Anthropic data center, Anthropic can use Bloom Energy's modular generators to bring data centers online sooner. It isn't far-fetched that Anthropic would turn to Bloom because several of Anthropic cloud-based partners already use Bloom for power needs.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), through Amazon Web Services, is a major cloud partner for Anthropic. AWS works closely with American Electric Power (NASDAQ: AEP), which deploys Bloom Energy fuel cells across multiple data center campuses. Specialized cloud provider CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV), which works with Anthropic, has a partnership to use Bloom Energy power cells at a data center.

Bloom is already seeing strong growth

The company's financial strength and growing stability are two other reasons Anthropic would turn to it rather than another power provider.

Bloom Energy posted record numbers in the third quarter. It reported revenue of $1.26 billion, up 138% year over year. That allowed the company to raise full-year revenue guidance to between $4.4 billion and $4.6 billion, up 122% at the midpoint.

It's not just revenue that's growing. The company reported earnings per share (EPS) of $0.78, up from an EPS loss of $0.10 in the same period a year ago. Bloom points to a yearly non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) EPS range of $3.10 to $3.40, compared to $0.76 in 2025.

Bloom has an edge over Oklo

Another possibility for Anthropic is to use small modular reactors (SMRs) from Oklo (NYSE: OKLO) to provide behind-the-meter power to its data centers.

However, Bloom's SOFCs are already operating at scale. Its systems can be made, delivered, and put into use within months to a year, providing a quick power solution for new data centers. Oklo's SMRs are promising, but its first commercial reactor is not scheduled to come online until 2027 or later, with large-scale multi-gigawatt rollouts pushed out toward 2030 and beyond.

On top of that, the regulatory climate for Bloom's power cells is much easier than for any type of nuclear reactor.

James Halley has positions in American Electric Power. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Bloom Energy. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.