Data centers’ reliance on private natural gas plants is a key near-term risk to Anthropic. In the company’s IPO filing on Monday, it warned that the data center gas buildout could drive prices higher in some regions, affecting its AI ambitions and other data center operators around the country.
As America’s data center boom keeps growing, the facilities are set to consume a staggering amount of natural gas, with many companies opting to build their own plants rather than wait years for grid connection. Energy analyst company Cleanview estimates that behind-the-meter gas projects in development as of October 2026 at 110 gigawatts, up from just 20 gigawatts in July of 2025.
Competition from other natural gas-fired data centers could leave Anthropic exposed to “fuel price volatility and supply disruptions that are outside of our control,” the company wrote in its IPO filing, and “could drive up the price of natural gas in such areas and may adversely affect our ability to contract for firm fuel supply.”
The surge in demand for gas comes on top of an already tight market for natural gas. US export terminals are sending more gas abroad for a variety of reasons, including geopolitical conflicts and federal support for exports. Export demand is expected to double over the next decade.
Still, data centers could add a hefty chunk of demand, even if just some of what’s in the pipeline is built. BloombergNEF estimates that grid-connected data centers alone could add an additional 15 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas demand by 2035, a 15 percent increase in overall demand. Adding on a conservative estimate of onsite gas capacity in the pipeline would add another 3 billion cubic feet per day by the next decade.
Anthropic has traditionally relied on renting compute from major cloud service providers. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and SpaceX are specifically named in the IPO. (Anthropic is renting server space from the latter’s Colossus data centers in Memphis, Tennessee, which is facing a lawsuit for relying on unpermitted gas turbines.)
But the company has moved in recent months to directly lease and develop data centers, in a bid to lessen its reliance on other tech giants and more directly control its own data centers. In the IPO, it singles out its $50 billion partnership with Fluidstack, announced last year, which “provides data center development and operations services” for the company. It has announced data center sites in Texas and New York.
Doing so, though, exposes it to more risks, including the rises in natural gas prices. The company has also been tied to developing data centers with major on-site gas projects in states as spread out as Louisiana, Texas, and West Virginia. The latter could eventually be among the largest gas plants in the US, according to developer Nscale’s own IPO filing.
The geographical dispersion of its data centers opens Anthropic up to regional gas supply shocks and markets. That’s particularly true in the Southeast, where projects will have to compete with LNG exports.
“It wouldn’t be surprising if you start to see gas start to get more expensive in Louisiana and Texas, where all the LNG projects are concentrated,” says Enrique Gonzalez, BNEF’s head of gas research for the Americas.
Texas is also the national hotspot for behind-the-meter data center development, putting multiple developers in competition for the same, potentially limited gas supply. Anthropic acknowledges this risk in its IPO filing, writing that “we expect increased competition among users for the same natural gas supply and pipeline capacity in those areas. This competition could drive up the price of natural gas in such areas and may adversely affect our ability to contract for firm fuel supply.”
Any strain on gas supply could have knock-on prices for home energy bills. Gonzalez thinks that natural gas producers learned their lesson from the energy crisis of 2022, when high gas prices caused production to increase, in turn knocking down prices. While markets are unlikely to be that extreme in the coming years, “if hub prices rise, there’s a chance—unless you have legislation—that it goes to consumers,” he says.
One solution for this is, of course, to look at renewables, which also have the added climate benefit of being carbon-free. But Anthropic mentions them once in its IPO filing, and only to dismiss them. “Newer sources of generation, such as solar, wind, battery storage, nuclear, and geothermal power, may not be available in the quantities or on the timelines we require, or may be available only at higher cost,” the prospectus states.
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