Anthropic has signed a $35 billion cloud deal with Nvidia-backed Lambda, with Nvidia taking the lease on the Texas data centre.
According to the Wall Street Journal the deal gives Anthropic access to more pricey AI computing kit, while Nvidia uses its financial bulk to grease the wheels for a customer.
People familiar with the deal said Nvidia holds the lease on the site, which is being developed by bitcoin miner and data centre outfit Hut 8 in Nueces County, Texas.
Nvidia signed an agreement with Hut 8 a few weeks ago to lock up the capacity, according to those people.
The arrangement lets Anthropic tap expensive computing resources while helping Lambda land a fat cloud contract without having to secure the data centre space itself.
Lambda will use the Hut 8 site to plug in chips bought from Nvidia, which has already backed the cloud provider as an investor.
It is unclear how much Lambda will pay Nvidia for access to the space, leaving the financial plumbing a bit murky. Anthropic has been racing to lock down cloud capacity after a supply crunch earlier this year, just as its AI products began to attract more attention.
Earlier this month, Anthropic signed a $45 billion deal with another Nvidia-backed neocloud, Nscale, to rent Nvidia capacity from a West Virginia site.
The Texas deal is awkward because Hut 8 is separately building data centres for Anthropic that will house Google tensor processing units, which compete with Nvidia’s chips. Google has provided financial guarantees for those projects, enabling Hut 8 to raise debt.
In July, Hut 8 said a “high-investment-grade company” had signed 15-year leases for its entire 700-megawatt Texas campus, but did not name the tenant.Hut 8 said the $20 billion facility would be designed to support Nvidia chips, which rather narrows the guessing game.
In July, Nvidia announced a scheme to offer credit support to neoclouds such as Lambda in exchange for a slice of their cloud revenue.
The Journal reported that Nvidia has since paused some of those revenue-sharing deals. It could not be determined whether Lambda must hand Nvidia a portion of the revenue it earns at the Texas site.
