Anthropic's hiring spree for data center roles signals aggressive vertical integration into compute infrastructure operations, expanding beyond cloud provider reliance.

Anthropic is racing to increase its AI compute capacity in the Asia-Pacific region as the company works to keep up with soaring demand for its products. The U.S.-based AI lab is currently hiring for 13 roles in its compute department, which focuses on developing and managing AI data centers, with eight of these positions based in Australia or Japan.

In Japan, Anthropic is hiring for two roles: sourcing data center deals and a data center electrical engineer. Australia has six open positions, all focused on data center engineers and operators. The company was also hiring for a data center deal sourcing role in Australia in April.

Anthropic, the world's most valuable private company, announced a series of U.S.-based data center deals in the spring and was hiring for a compute capacity negotiation role in Europe in April. The company is increasingly turning to overseas expansion as usage of its enterprise and consumer products has accelerated in recent months.

"Growth at this pace places an inevitable strain on our infrastructure; our unprecedented consumer growth, in particular, has impacted reliability and performance," Anthropic stated in an April blog post.

Despite continued tension with the U.S. administration over the use of its AI models, Anthropic has maintained its breakneck growth trajectory. The company raised $65 billion in May at a $965 billion valuation. Its revenue run-rate crossed $47 billion that month—multiple times higher than the "around $9 billion" the company reported at the end of 2025.

As part of its compute capacity expansion, a listing for a data center energy role in Australia specifically mentions the company's "rapidly expanding AI compute footprint across the region" and references "multi-hundred megawatt procurement efforts."

Australia offers excess land, abundant renewable energy potential, and a stable political and regulatory environment, according to David Wroe, head of AI and Security Program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The country also provides "distance from military threats, which have proved such a vulnerability for the Gulf states," Wroe told CNBC. Conflict in the Middle East has tested the region's credentials as a secure location for AI infrastructure, with two Amazon data centers targeted early in the war.

Australia's participation in the Five Eyes intelligence sharing partnership with the U.S. further positions the country as a safe destination for compute development, especially as AI models grow more powerful and increasingly treated as national security assets, Wroe added.

However, the "main obstacle" to large-scale AI infrastructure development in Australia lies in copyright laws "which put an AI company at risk of being sued by rights holders," Wroe said. Some Australian politicians are campaigning against copyright carve-outs for AI companies seeking to use content for training commercial products.

Anthropic directed CNBC to comments made in May regarding international expansion: "We're very intentional about where we'll add capacity—partnering with democratic countries whose legal and regulatory frameworks support investments of this scale, and where the supply chain on which our compute depends—hardware, networking, and facilities—will be secure," the company stated in a blog post.

While roles in Australia and Japan do not feature published salary bands, a London-based data center deal sourcing role for Europe that the company was hiring for in April offered a salary between £225,000 and £270,000 ($296,854–$355,253). Engineering and technical roles in data centers are particularly sought after due to labor shortages, with salaries for these positions rising.

Japan has evolving grid infrastructure and significant government interest in domestic AI infrastructure, according to Anthropic's job advertisement. Anthropic is not alone in its interest in the region. Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment into Japan in April, which will include developing AI infrastructure, and GMI Cloud announced a $12 billion sovereign AI project in March.

"Japan is a particularly appealing place to invest in Asia because of its political stability, reliable power grid, highly developed Internet and subsea cable infrastructure and technically skilled workforce," said Aalok Mehta, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "In many ways that reflects factors that are driving so much data center investment in the United States."

AI infrastructure projects in Japan still face critical challenges regarding energy access, as do projects globally. For many data center developers across Asia-Pacific, "securing power is becoming more challenging than securing land, financing or permits," said Xiaonan Feng, principal analyst of APAC power and renewables at Wood Mackenzie. "Grid availability is emerging as the defining constraint on data centre growth."