Meta is in talks to rent computing power from its artificial intelligence data centers to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years, three people with knowledge of the discussions said, a potential step toward a new A.I. business for the social networking company.

Anthropic proposed the deal in June and Meta is considering it, said the people, who were not authorized to discuss confidential conversations. While the specifics were in flux, Anthropic would pay Meta in monthly increments over the two-year period, the people said. The companies would be able to opt out of any agreement early, they added.

Anthropic’s proposal to Meta was about a third of the size of a deal that the A.I. start-up signed with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in May. Under that agreement, Anthropic is paying the rocket company $45 billion over three years — or $1.25 billion a month — for computing power. The deal included similar provisions that let either company exit the agreement early.

Meta’s talks with Anthropic are in their early stages and may not result in a deal, the people with knowledge of the discussions said. Anthropic and Meta declined to comment.

The talks underline how eager leading A.I. companies are to get their hands on more computing power to rapidly develop the technology, as tech giants including Meta, Google, Microsoft and others shovel hundreds of billions of dollars into building dozens of new data centers all over the world. The construction boom, which has raised spending by tech companies to an extraordinary degree, has stirred concerns on Wall Street about whether such sums can be justified.

For Meta, a deal would be especially significant. It could open a new line of business for the company and potentially alleviate pressure from investors, who have questioned how much Meta has been spending on data centers to develop cutting-edge A.I. models. Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, has said his company will spend as much as $145 billion this year, much of it on A.I., which would be more than double the $72 billion it spent last year.

But Meta has faced questions about whether its own A.I. models can compete with those developed by rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI. And the company has acknowledged that it may build more data centers than it needs, relative to the number of customers using its A.I. products. Selling excess computing power to companies like Anthropic could provide Meta with a new revenue stream until demand for its own A.I. services catches up.

On recent calls with investors, Mr. Zuckerberg has hinted that selling computing power could be one way for Meta to see some return on its A.I. investments.

“Almost every week there are different companies that come to us from the outside asking us” about computing power “that they could buy from us at some premium to what we’ve bought it at,” Mr. Zuckerberg said on an investor call in May. “We haven’t done that yet because we think we have a use for the compute.”

“But obviously if we get to a point where we feel that we have overbuilt, then that is an option that we have, and that is partially what gives us confidence in investing in building this out,” he said.

A.I. companies have grown more comfortable striking deals with rivals out of necessity because of how scarce computing power has become. Anthropic, which is valued at nearly $1 trillion in the private market and has filed to go public, has seen a surge in demand since the release of its enterprise software product, Claude Code. As a result, it has needed to work with companies that own large amounts of processing power to serve its growing customer base.

Since Meta does not have a business selling its computing power, that has complicated its talks with Anthropic, one of the people with knowledge of the discussions said.

Meta has also struck its own deals to rent computing power from other data center providers, even as it builds it own facilities. That includes a $21 billion deal with CoreWeave, a provider of A.I. computing power, in April and a $27 billion deal with Nebius, another such company, in March.

Since those deals were signed, the price of computing power has skyrocketed because of limited supply and increased demand, said Mandeep Singh, a technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. That has presented Meta with an opportunity to rent out its data centers while still investing in its own A.I. in the long term, he added.