The two AI labs, which previously secured multi-hundred-megawatt and gigawatt capacity deals, are now exploring compute capacity deals for much smaller deployments. Anthropic has sounded out agreements in the U.K. and Nordics, while OpenAI has explored opportunities in the Nordics for these smaller capacity deployments. Both companies are also discussing U.S. deployments at this scale.

OpenAI stated it is building a diversified compute portfolio to meet growing global AI demand. Smaller capacity deals allow for faster workload deployment amid the AI boom, as securing a few megawatts at an existing site is often more practical than waiting for larger blocks. This shift is partly driven by the increasing proportion of AI compute moving from model training to serving inference, with inference workloads expected to overtake training workloads in 2027.