Anthropic looks to hire six-figure role for negotiating data center deals to fuel Europe AI expansion

Anthropic is ramping up a push to secure European data center deals to power its AI models, as it looks to hire a role for negotiating compute capacity in the region.

U.S. hyperscalers' AI infrastructure expenditure is set to top $600 billion in 2026. Anthropic is looking to capitalize on the boom and has announced a slew of data center deals in the U.S. in recent weeks.

While it's yet to unveil any in Europe, that could be about to change. Anthropic is now recruiting for a principal to "drive the commercial sourcing and transaction execution process" for its European data center capacity deals, according to a job advert posted in London.

Anthropic declined to comment on the job advert or its plans for data centers in Europe.

It comes on the back of a number of AI infrastructure deals for the company. Anthropic said this week that it's committed to spending more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services tech over the next 10 years. It also signed an expanded deal with Broadcom earlier this month for about 3.5 gigawatts worth of computing capacity.

Anthropic is currently evaluating deals to acquire data center capacity directly from developers "across the world," a source familiar with discussions told CNBC.

The role for a 'Transaction Principal' will pay a salary between £225,000 ($303,806) and £270,000 and will be "critical" to securing the infrastructure that powers Anthropic's frontier AI systems across Europe.

Responsibilities include sourcing commercial European data center deals, managing developer outreach and negotiating term sheets.

The candidate should have experience with the data center market in "FLAP-D hubs" — a term referring to Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin — alongside markets like the Nordics and Southern Europe.

Anthropic is also hiring for a similar role based in Australia.

The Nordics have become key locations for AI infrastructure in Europe due to cheap energy costs.

Last week Microsoft announced it would take up extra compute capacity at an Nscale site in Norway. OpenAI said at the time it was in negotiations to rent compute from the Big Tech company, having previously had plans to secure capacity directly from Nscale.

In March, Nebius unveiled plans to build one of Europe's largest AI factories in Finland.

Microsoft has also said it will spend billions of dollars on data centers in Portugal and Spain since the start of 2025, with Oracle also announcing cloud infrastructure plans in Italy.

Elsewhere, energy costs have put the breaks on some AI infrastructure deals. Earlier this month, OpenAI confirmed it halted plans for its U.K. Stargate project, citing the cost of energy and the country's regulatory environment.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have announced they will be scaling European operations in recent weeks.