Anthropic is hiring for eight data center roles in Australia and Japan as it races to expand compute capacity outside the United States, CNBC reported Thursday. The company currently has 13 open positions in its compute department, with six focused on data center engineering and operations in Australia and two in Japan covering deal sourcing and electrical engineering.
The expansion follows a period of extreme growth. Anthropic raised $65 billion in May at a $965 billion valuation, and its revenue run-rate crossed $47 billion that month, up from “around $9 billion” at the end of 2025, according to CNBC. “Growth at this pace places an inevitable strain on our infrastructure; our unprecedented consumer growth, in particular, has impacted reliability and performance,” the company said in an April blog post.
Why Australia and Japan
For teams running persistent agents that depend on Claude inference, the geographic expansion has practical implications. Agent workloads generate sustained, high-volume API calls that are latency-sensitive. Distributed compute closer to Asia-Pacific users reduces round-trip time for agent tool-calling loops.
Australia offers excess land, abundant renewable energy potential, and a stable regulatory environment, according to David Wroe, head of the AI and Security Program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, who told CNBC the country also has “distance from military threats, which have proved such a vulnerability for the Gulf states.” Australia’s membership in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partnership makes it a trusted destination for sensitive compute infrastructure.
A listing for a data center energy role in Australia mentions Anthropic’s “rapidly expanding AI compute footprint across the region” and references leading “multi-hundred megawatt procurement efforts,” per CNBC.
Japan has “evolving grid infrastructure and significant government interest in domestic AI infrastructure,” according to the Anthropic job listing. Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment in Japan in April, and GMI Cloud announced a $12 billion sovereign AI project in March, according to CNBC. Aalok Mehta, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CNBC that Japan’s “political stability, reliable power grid, highly developed Internet and subsea cable infrastructure and technically skilled workforce” mirror the factors driving US data center investment.
Constraints Remain
Copyright laws in Australia pose a risk. Some Australian politicians are campaigning against copyright carve-outs for AI companies seeking to use content for training, which could complicate large-scale infrastructure investment, according to CNBC.
Power access is the binding constraint across the Asia-Pacific region. “Securing power is becoming more challenging than securing land, financing or permits,” Xiaonan Feng, principal analyst of APAC power and renewables at Wood Mackenzie, told CNBC. “Grid availability is emerging as the defining constraint on data centre growth.”
Anthropic framed its international expansion strategy around security and governance. “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 said in a May blog post cited by CNBC.