# Anthropic Leases a Hudson Square Tower Even as It Rations Its Own AI Model > Source: > Published: 2026-07-08 03:22:17+00:00 *Anthropic is taking over an entire 16-story office tower in Lower Manhattan, a 30-fold jump in space, at the same moment it's telling subscribers to pay extra for its newest model because server capacity hasn't kept up.* The New York Times reported on July 7 that Anthropic plans to lease all 466,000 square feet of 330 Hudson Street in the Hudson Square neighborhood, according to people familiar with the deal. That's not a floor or two. It's the whole building, and it dwarfs the roughly 15,500 square feet Anthropic currently occupies at 155 Avenue of the Americas, a space it only signed in 2024. The company has reportedly been shopping for between 250,000 and 450,000 square feet since January, and it landed above the top of that range. Techmeme, citing the Times, put a number on the ambition behind the square footage: Anthropic intends to double its New York headcount to 1,000 people this year, with relocations starting this summer. You don't take an entire tower on Hudson Street, a corridor better known for Google's sprawling campus and ad-tech offices than for AI labs, unless you're planning to compete for people who'd otherwise take a job at a bank or a hedge fund - or at Google itself. New York has never been the default AI hiring ground. San Francisco is. Anthropic betting this much space on Manhattan is a statement that it wants finance-adjacent talent, policy staff, and enterprise sales teams who have no interest in relocating to the Bay Area. Here's the part that makes the timing strange. Days before the Hudson Street report, Anthropic told Pro, Max, and Team subscribers that Claude Fable 5 was leaving standard subscription access. As of July 7, using the model means buying metered credits on top of whatever you already pay, at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, according to reporting from BleepingComputer and Windows Report. Anthropic's own explanation was blunt: demand for Fable 5 is running high and is hard to predict, and the company doesn't have the servers to match it. A Claude Code lead engineer said the change is meant to be temporary, with Fable returning to subscriptions once capacity catches up, though no date was given. So the company signing a lease for an entire Manhattan skyscraper is, in the same week, asking its heaviest users to pay extra because it ran out of chips to serve them. That's not a contradiction so much as a snapshot of where Anthropic's growth is actually strained. Office space is comparatively cheap and fast to add. Compute is neither. Anthropic isn't sitting still on infrastructure. On July 6, TeraWulf announced a 20-year lease with Anthropic worth roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue, tied to a 401-megawatt data center campus TeraWulf is building on a former aluminum smelting site in Hawesville, Kentucky, CNBC and Data Center Dynamics reported. The catch is timing: initial capacity isn't expected online until the second half of 2027, with the campus fully operational by early 2028. In May, Anthropic also locked up SpaceX's Colossus 1 site, more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, according to prior reporting, plus separate capacity agreements with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. None of that solves the shortage sitting in front of users today. Money isn't the constraint. In late May, Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion valuation, led by Altimeter Capital, Greenoaks, Dragoneer, and Sequoia Capital, according to CNBC and Axios, pushing past OpenAI's $852 billion valuation. Anthropic's revenue run rate hit $47 billion, up from $30 billion earlier in the year, compared with OpenAI's roughly $25 billion in annual recurring revenue over a similar stretch. Both companies are reportedly angling toward IPOs. A trillion-dollar-adjacent valuation buys you a Manhattan tower without blinking. A data center that's ready next quarter is another matter. That gap, real estate and headcount scaling faster than the GPUs to back them, is the actual story here. Anthropic can hire a thousand people in New York well before Hawesville, Kentucky sends a single watt to a Claude query. Whether that bet pays off depends on whether the company can close the compute gap before the talent it's recruiting starts asking why the product they're building keeps running into capacity walls. **Also read:** [China Will Debut the World's First AI Agent Phone at Its Shanghai AI Summit](https://startupfortune.com/china-will-debut-the-worlds-first-ai-agent-phone-at-its-shanghai-ai-summit/) • [A Former Tesla Optimus Engineer Is Betting Europe Can Build Its Own Robots](https://startupfortune.com/a-former-tesla-optimus-engineer-is-betting-europe-can-build-its-own-robots/) • [Quaise Energy raises $144 million to drill for superhot geothermal power](https://startupfortune.com/quaise-energy-raises-144-million-to-drill-for-superhot-geothermal-power/)