Sept 2 (Reuters) - Hi, it's Krystal and it feels good to be back in the saddle after spending the past few months on a very loud and lively project -- raising my baby. Like many first-time parents, I asked Dr. ChatGPT plenty of questions -- Why is the baby crying again? When will he sleep through the night? -- but otherwise stayed happily outside the AI news cycle and deep in the newborn trenches.

My very San Francisco welcome back came when friends started telling me their downtown rents had jumped as much as 40% year over year. Turns out AI companies accounted for 30% of San Francisco office leasing in the first half of 2026, according to real estate services firm CBRE, and they do everything to incentivize employees to stay close to the office.

Brokers say AI startups increasingly want 24/7 independently controlled heating and air conditioning to accommodate 12-hour working days, plus showers. Some are even offering employees $10,000 housing stipends to live within half a mile of the office.

The frenzy is spilling into residential real estate. Cash may still be king, but brokers tell me coveted private shares in OpenAI and Anthropic can make an offer more appealing in a city eagerly awaiting potentially massive IPOs.

The upcoming AI listings will keep my colleagues and me busy. Anthropic's increasingly ambitious compute deals look familiar: in some ways, it's borrowing from OpenAI's playbook. Plus, we dig into the soaring disclosures that define this AI boom. Scroll on.

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ANTHROPIC BORROWS OPENAI'S PLAYBOOK

For all their differences in personality and strategy, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seem to be converging on one idea: you can never have too much compute.

That wasn't always Anthropic's posture. A year ago, Amodei sounded skeptical of some of the enormous, circular infrastructure transactions proliferating across AI, warning about "crazy deals" and "YOLO-ing" on compute power before demand was proven.

But Anthropic's own growth has changed the math and Amodei's mind. As revenue for Claude surged this year, the company went on a compute shopping spree of its own -- signing a $30 billion Azure commitment tied to Microsoft and Nvidia, a roughly $45 billion infrastructure deal with British AI company Nscale, and a $1.25 billion monthly agreement with SpaceX for access to compute.

The strategy increasingly resembles what OpenAI was doing last summer: secure capacity wherever you can find it, across multiple providers.

OpenAI executives even took a swipe at Amodei's earlier caution, opens new tab in an investor memo this year, arguing that "in hindsight, that caution looks less like discipline and more like underestimating how fast demand would arrive." OpenAI has long pitched its ability to secure enormous amounts of compute as a competitive advantage. Anthropic now appears to be reaching a similar conclusion.

The other half of OpenAI's infrastructure playbook is custom silicon -- and Anthropic is moving ⁠into that area too.

We broke the news last month that Anthropic had formed a "Custom Silicon Team" to design application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, tailored to Claude's models. The company has hired Clive Chan, the former engineer at OpenAI's own chip program, and held talks about partnering with TPU-veteran startup MatX. Anthropic is playing catch-up by roughly two years. OpenAI already has its first in-house chip in hand, while Anthropic is only now building the team and supplier relationships needed to develop its own.

To be sure, Anthropic's approach has been more measured. It waited for revenue and customer demand to materialize before making some of these enormous commitments. Once that growth arrived, locking up future capacity made more sense.

OpenAI has also taken a more asset-heavy approach, getting more directly involved in data-center financing, power and hardware. Anthropic still relies more heavily on ⁠partners to provide the infrastructure, preserving flexibility. The trade-off is that Anthropic has less control over supply and is now fighting for scarce compute in real time -- often paying a premium for capacity that may not come online for several years.

Maybe that's the lesson at frontier-lab scale: compute has to be secured years before you actually need it. Everyone is betting not just on how much customers need today, but on where demand will be several model generations from now.

The two labs are arriving at the same conclusion from opposite directions: OpenAI built ⁠ahead of demand; Anthropic waited for demand -- and is now racing to build ahead of it.

The question is whether it is too late.

CHART OF THE WEEK

As AI's infrastructure boom gets bigger, so do the potential conflicts of interest. My colleague Robert Cyran dug through recent filings and counted the pages companies devote in their IPO prospectuses to disclosing "certain relationships and related-party transactions."

SB Energy stands out with 14 pages, ahead of CoreWeave's 10. The SoftBank-controlled energy company is reinventing itself as an AI data-center operator and potentially ⁠seeking a valuation of around $50 billion. SoftBank is simultaneously its controlling shareholder, parent, customer and guarantor, while OpenAI is both a major tenant and software supplier and has received warrants tied to its contract. OpenAI represents about 8.753 GW of SB Energy's 8.8 GW contracted portfolio -- roughly 99% of capacity. Nvidia adds another loop: it is investing $3 billion while guaranteeing part of OpenAI's lease obligations.

These circular arrangements can help get enormous AI projects financed and built quickly, but they also test investors' risk appetite by making it harder to distinguish independent demand from demand supported by companies with financial interests on multiple sides of the transaction.

Reporting by Krystal Hu, Editing by Ken Li and Rosalba O'Brien

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Krystal Hu

Thomson Reuters

Krystal reports on venture capital and startups for Reuters. She covers Silicon Valley and beyond through the lens of money and characters, with a focus on growth-stage startups, tech investments and AI. She has previously covered M&A for Reuters, breaking stories on Trump's SPAC and Elon Musk's Twitter financing. Previously, she reported on Amazon for Yahoo Finance, and her investigation of the company's retail practice was cited by lawmakers in Congress. Krystal started a career in journalism by writing about tech and politics in China. She has a master's degree from New York University, and enjoys a scoop of Matcha ice cream as much as getting a scoop at work.

NEWSLETTER: Anthropic was cautious on mega infra deals. Then demand surged