Anthropic Signs $35 Billion Cloud Deal Backed by Nvidia
Nvidia will supply chips to Texas data center and hold the lease, another example of the company using its financial might to boost a customer
- Anthropic signed a $35 billion cloud-computing deal with Nvidia-backed Lambda, with Nvidia holding the lease on the Texas data center.
- Hut 8 is developing the Texas data center, and Nvidia signed an agreement with Hut 8 to secure the capacity.
- Anthropic also signed a $45 billion deal with Nvidia-backed Nscale to rent capacity from a West Virginia site.
Anthropic has signed a cloud-computing deal worth $35 billion with Nvidia NVDA 1.48%increase; up pointing triangle-backed cloud provider Lambda, with Nvidia itself holding the lease on the data center, according to people familiar with the deal.
The data center is being developed by Hut 8, a bitcoin miner and data-center developer, in Nueces County, Texas. Nvidia signed an agreement with Hut 8 a few weeks ago to secure the capacity, the people said.
The convoluted arrangement is another example of Nvidia’s growing role in helping non-investment-grade firms such as Anthropic get access to its expensive computing resources. The deal also helped a nascent cloud provider, Lambda, secure a lucrative contract with Anthropic without needing to procure the data-center space on its own.
Lambda will use the data center Hut 8 is developing to plug in chips bought from Nvidia, which is also its investor. It is not clear how much Lambda will pay Nvidia to access the data-center space.
Anthropic has been racing to sign cloud-capacity deals after hitting a supply crunch earlier this year that coincided with its products gaining traction. The AI developer signed a $45 billion deal earlier this month with another Nvidia-backed neocloud, Nscale, to rent Nvidia capacity from its West Virginia site, according to people familiar with the deal.
Bloomberg previously reported on Nscale’s deal with Anthropic.
The Texas deal is notable in part because Hut 8 is separately developing data centers for Anthropic that will house Google’s tensor processing units, which compete with Nvidia’s chips. Google has provided financial guarantees to support those projects to help Hut 8 raise debt.
In July, Hut 8 disclosed that a “high-investment-grade company” signed 15-year leases for its entire 700-megawatt Texas campus, but didn’t name the tenant. Hut 8 did say that the $20 billion facility would be designed to support Nvidia chips.
In July, Nvidia announced an initiative to offer credit support to so-called neoclouds such as Lambda in exchange for a cut of their cloud revenue. But the firm recently paused some deals in that program, the Journal reported. It couldn’t be learned whether Lambda is required to provide Nvidia with a share of the revenue it generates at the Texas site.