Our approach to responsible data center development

People around the world use Claude to power businesses, improve patient care, accelerate scientific discovery, and defend critical infrastructure. Demand for this technology is growing quickly. Meeting that demand takes a steady supply of computing power, which is why we’re developing our own data centers.

As a public benefit corporation, we balance the broader interests of society with our business decisions in everything we do. We will approach our infrastructure build-out the same way: data centers should benefit the communities around them. Here are some of the steps we’re taking globally to deliver on that commitment.

Investing billions in local communities: We’re committing tens of millions of dollars to Community Benefit Agreements for each of Anthropic’s data centers around the world, adding up to billions of community investment globally. We’ll partner with local leaders and residents on how they want to spend this money. That could mean funding emergency services, building libraries and parks, paying teacher bonuses, improving local infrastructure, or lowering property taxes for households nearby. For example, near one data center we’re developing in Texas, we learned from local leaders that the water system needed significant repairs to prevent recurring water outages, and we committed millions to repair it. We look forward to funding more community priorities like this one and transparently reporting on the investments we make.
Declining local tax incentives: Data centers are often subsidized by tax breaks from the local communities where they’re developed. We will not accept local tax incentives for any future data center sites. That means the full local property tax revenue from our data centers stays within communities to fund schools, roads, and public services.
Ensuring transparency: We won’t ask public officials to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) as part of their work with us. When we announce or expand a site, we plan to share important information like our emissions, local water use, and the number of construction jobs we expect it to create. After a site is up and running, we’ll publish key metrics on its impacts each year. These metrics will be verified by an independent third party. And members of the Anthropic team will be on the ground, so community leaders and residents can bring their questions directly to us.
Protecting local water supply: Our data centers require little to no water to operate. Our cooling standard is closed-loop and air-cooled, which means we don’t draw down local water supplies to cool servers. For data centers that utilize on-site power generation, we expect some additional water usage, largely attributable to emissions control. Taken together, in 2027 we expect all our centers with on-site power generation to use only about as much water as one car assembly plant, or the home water consumption of 10,000 people.
Limiting air and noise impacts: We follow the air permitting process everywhere we operate and require the same of the plants powering our data centers. Those plants must also use emissions control technology, including selective catalytic reduction, a leading technology for reducing smog-forming pollution. To limit noise, we enclose our equipment in soundproofing and silence its air intake and exhaust, and our contracts require operators to meet local noise limits.
Addressing energy costs: Ratepayers should not have higher energy bills because of data centers. This year, we announced a plan to cover the costs of electricity price increases from our data centers. That includes paying for the grid upgrades necessary for powering our sites and for estimated price increases that come from the extra demand our centers place on the grid. We’ll publish our market-by-market methodology to increase transparency. We’re also exploring ways to reduce local electricity bills and will have more to share soon.
Bringing new power to the grid: We’re working to add new power generation to serve our data centers, so we aren’t drawing down the supply that homes and businesses rely on. Much of that new power is natural gas, which can be brought online quickly, ramps up and down as demand changes, and is abundant in the places we’re considering for data centers. We’re also working to broaden our energy mix with geothermal, wind, solar, and emerging technologies, and in regions with strong renewable resources, we’re designing projects that will rely on renewable energy. To help address emissions, we’ve joined Frontier, a group that supports companies working on carbon removal, to help grow the market for carbon removal and storage.

These commitments apply to every data center site Anthropic owns or leases in the United States and around the world. Many governments share our goals, and we’ll work within the principles and standards they’ve set for data centers in their countries. We want the communities that host our data centers to be better off for it, and we’ll keep listening, working with our neighbors, and reporting our progress with these commitments as we build.