Anthropic's IPO Filing Reveals AI Industry's Heavy Reliance on Natural Gas

Anthropic IPO Filing Reveals: Today's AI Industry Relies Heavily on Natural Gas

2026-10-27 11:09 IT Home - Qingyuan

IT Home, October 27 news: According to a report by foreign media The Verge this morning (the 27th), Anthropic, which is preparing for an IPO, revealed in its S-1 registration filing the generative AI industry's heavy dependence on methane. The filing states that electricity supply and data center site selection with favorable power supply conditions both face fierce competition.

In the filing submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Anthropic acknowledged that data centers are increasingly reliant on "natural gas," whose main component is methane.

This means Anthropic's plans to build AI data centers will be constrained by fuel price increases and supply chain bottlenecks. The filing also acknowledges that global temperature rise caused by burning fossil fuels will further drive up its own operating costs.

Some planned data centers will need to rely on gas turbines for on-site power generation. Anthropic rents computing resources from large cloud computing service providers, and last year also announced a $50 billion (IT Home note: approximately 334.188 billion yuan at current exchange rates) investment plan to expand the scale of data centers in Texas and New York.

The United States has the highest concentration of data centers in the world. To meet the continuously growing electricity demand of data centers, the scale of fossil fuel power generation facilities planned for construction in the U.S. will reach its highest level in a decade.

Insufficient supply of gas turbines has also slowed data center construction. To shorten the waiting time for grid connection, some developers have chosen to install gas internal combustion engines to generate power themselves. Due to order backlogs at gas turbine manufacturers, developers have also turned to relatively simpler gas turbines, which not only reduces on-site power generation efficiency but also increases pollution.

While data centers increase greenhouse gas emissions, Anthropic has listed climate change as an operational risk in its IPO filing. As temperatures rise, the electricity and water costs needed to cool data center servers will also increase accordingly.

Anthropic also expects that as large cloud computing service providers and data center operators rush to build data centers, competition for natural gas supply and pipeline capacity will intensify, and this competition may drive up gas prices.

IT Home learned from the report that natural gas power generation accounts for 40% of total U.S. electricity generation, making it the primary power generation method in the United States. As power companies step up upgrades to energy infrastructure to meet continuously growing electricity demand, the American public is also bearing increasingly higher costs.

Residents across the United States who are dissatisfied with data center construction have successfully blocked dozens of proposed projects. Anthropic acknowledges that concerns about sharp electricity price increases alone are enough to affect the progress of data center projects. "If the measures we take to obtain electricity supply are deemed to affect other electricity users and the grid as a whole, regulators may attach restrictive conditions, impose backup power supply fees, or raise other requirements to address these impacts."

If regulators require data center developers to bear more of the construction costs of new energy infrastructure, Anthropic's operating expenses may further increase. If a stable supply of natural gas cannot be ensured, or the pipelines needed to transport natural gas are lacking, some data center construction plans may even be forced to delay or cancel. These problems could ultimately constrain Anthropic's business growth.