Anthropic is moving away from exclusive dependence on cloud giants and is shifting towards direct infrastructure management. According to job listings spotted by Data Center Dynamics, the company is forming its own infrastructure teams in London and Sydney. This strategic expansion targets key hubs — Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin. For a company striving for leadership, simply "renting capacity" from providers is no longer enough.
This maneuver comes as OpenAI has recently put its Stargate projects in the UK and Norway on hold. While OpenAI pauses construction, Anthropic is playing the long game. Despite large cloud contracts with investors like Google, AWS, and Microsoft, Anthropic is planning to invest $50 billion in its own data centers. Physical presence in Europe is a way to address regulatory requirements. Government structures and large businesses in the EU require local control and data sovereignty guarantees.
In our view, Anthropic is consciously prioritizing control over infrastructure. This is a clear signal to the market: the era of "cloud romanticism" is ending. For those working in regulated sectors, local data residency is becoming a technical standard. Anthropic is creating a precedent for managing vulnerabilities associated with centralized dependence on American hyperscalers. In a world where data is the new oil, Anthropic has decided to build its own refinery directly on the client's territory.