Anthropic signed $10B multi-year compute deal with Volta, a Nvidia-backed cloud infrastructure provider
Computing power has become a scarce and urgent resource for AI companies, and Anthropic just agreed to spend $10 billion to secure it. The deal is with Volta Infra Holdings, an Nvidia-backed cloud startup founded in January. Volta and its partner Bitdeer Technologies Group, a bitcoin-mining company that operates data centers, will deliver the capacity from a site in Norway spanning six years.
On Tuesday, Volta announced it had signed the deal but did not name the AI lab. CEO Ricard Boada declined to identify the customer. Neither Anthropic nor Bitdeer would comment, but people close to the deal say the buyer is Anthropic. The Norway site will supply 133 megawatts and run on Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin processors.
Bitdeer's stock jumped almost 10% before markets opened Tuesday. Volta separately announced it had raised $300 million from venture investors, putting the startup's valuation at $2.4 billion.
Anthropic has made other infrastructure bets as well. It already has computing agreements with Elon Musk's SpaceX, chipmaker AMD, and Akamai Technologies, and it has held talks about renting capacity inside Meta's data centers. The company raised $65 billion from investors earlier this year and is weighing a U.S. stock-market debut as soon as this year.
Anthropic and rival OpenAI both rely on a mix of big tech firms and newer cloud startups for the capacity that powers advanced AI. That mix keeps the door open for newcomers with access to power and chips, which is why a startup barely a few months old can land a deal this size. Executives who previously worked at Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. launched Volta in January. Bitdeer, Volta's partner on the contract, is a crypto-mining company with data-center operations converting some crypto facilities in Texas, Tennessee, and Washington state.
OpenAI's Sam Altman has said he expects spending on AI physical infrastructure to reach trillions. OpenAI is planning a data center in Georgia that could cost more than $30 billion. The scale extends to Ohio, where Nvidia has been in talks to support OpenAI in renting a $500 billion hub that SoftBank would oversee, a 10-gigawatt project.
Critics have warned that some of the financing in these AI deals is circular, meaning the same companies keep doing business with one another, so if AI demand falls short, losses could spread fast. "The projects are real, and the payments are real," Volta CEO Ricard Boada said. The question is what happens if the AI boom slows down.
The AI boom has turned into a physical build-out of power plants, chips, and giant data centers, with the money trail now running through cloud startups and bitcoin miners, not just the famous AI labs. For investors, the upside is plain to see. The harder part is sizing up a web that has so many companies paying each other.