Anthropic has signed a $35B cloud deal that will give the Claude maker access to computing in a Texas data center, and chip giant Nvidia is involved in multiple aspects of the transaction.
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Under the terms of the deal, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic will be acquiring artificial intelligence computing power from Lambda, an AI-specific cloud provider — often referred to as a neocloud — that counts Nvidia as a major investor.
This computing power will live in a 350-megawatt data center being built in Nueces County, Texas, by Hut 8, a bitcoin miner turned AI data center developer with ties to the Trump family.
Hut 8 will not be leasing the data center directly to Lambda. Instead, Nvidia will officially be the tenant, giving Lambda access to the computing for an undisclosed sum. Nvidia will also supply the graphics processing unit chips generating the computing power in the Texas facility.
The deal is just the latest example of a tech giant like Nvidia using its balance sheet and credit rating to secure financing for data centers for less-established AI firms. Both Anthropic and Lambda are considered to be too large a credit risk as a tenant for a company like Hut 8 to finance the construction of a major data center. As the leaseholder, Nvidia effectively guarantees the project’s cash flow, giving Hut 8 the investment-grade tenant needed to secure capital.
Nvidia has been increasingly willing to facilitate major cloud deals by providing financial support to multiple parties involved in these transactions, an effort to help build what CEO Jensen Huang calls an “ecosystem” of companies that rely on its products.
In this case, Nvidia’s involvement allows Anthropic to get the computing capacity it desperately needs — capacity that comes in the form of Nvidia’s products. At the same time, Nvidia’s data center backstop allows Anthropic to give a major cloud contract to Lambda, a firm in which Nvidia is heavily invested.
The growing frequency of such deals has raised red flags among some investors, drawing accusations of circular financing and comparisons to the so-called vendor financing prevalent in the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.
This is not the first deal Anthropic has signed with an Nvidia-backed neocloud. Earlier this month, Anthropic signed a $45B deal with Nscale to rent computing capacity — supplied by Nvidia — at a West Virginia data center under development.
Anthropic is also involved in other data center deals with Hut 8. The two firms are partnering on multiple data centers to host Google’s Tensor Processing Units. Like Nvidia, Google is providing financial guarantees needed for Hut 8 to advance those projects.
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