Coatue Plans to Buy Land for Anthropic Data Centers
Venture capital and hedge fund giant Coatue has launched a new venture called Next Frontier, aimed at acquiring land near major power sources and converting those sites into data centers. The Coatue Next Frontier data center land acquisition play marks a significant shift for the firm, which has historically focused on software and technology investments rather than physical infrastructure.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Next Frontier has already entered a joint venture with Fluidstack, a cloud infrastructure startup that signed a $50 billion deal to build data centers specifically for Anthropic. The link to Anthropic is no coincidence. Coatue’s $70 billion investment firm, led by Philippe Laffont, already holds significant stakes in Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, as well as data center operators DayOne and CoreWeave. The new land venture deepens that position by moving further down the infrastructure stack.
Why Land Is the New Bottleneck in the AI Race
The urgency behind the Coatue Next Frontier data center land acquisition strategy becomes clear when you look at the numbers. The United States currently operates roughly 3,000 data centers, with over 1,500 additional facilities at various stages of construction, most of them in rural areas close to energy grids. Power availability, not capital or chips, has become the defining constraint for AI infrastructure.
Next Frontier is already working on a project to acquire land in Indiana for a major data center campus, according to Investing.com, with Anthropic among the target customers. Coatue has also invested in energy companies including GE Vernova and Vistra, signalling it intends to control the full power-to-compute chain. The land grab is on, and Coatue intends to be ahead of it.
