Anthropic has signed a $35 billion cloud computing agreement with Lambda, the Nvidia-backed cloud services provider, according to people familiar with the transaction. The data center capacity at the center of the deal is owned by Nvidia, which leased the rights weeks ago from Hut 8, the bitcoin miner turned data center developer that is building the facility in Nueces County, Texas.
The structure of the deal is intricate, and that intricacy is the story. Anthropic, one of the world’s most valuable AI companies, needs enormous amounts of computing power to train and run its models, but its balance sheet does not look like the balance sheet of a company that can finance billions of dollars of data center construction. It is rated below investment grade, a status shared by many fast-growing AI companies that spend faster than they earn. Nvidia, which makes the chips Anthropic needs and is also an investor in Lambda, has stepped in to solve the problem, locking up the Hut 8 capacity and making it available to the AI company through Lambda.
The arrangement shows how the AI industry is financing its own growth. Compute is the scarce resource, and the companies that control it hold the keys to the industry. Nvidia has been expanding its role beyond selling chips, using its cash and its relationships to stitch together the infrastructure deals that let its biggest customers afford the hardware. The company signed the lease with Hut 8 weeks ago, according to people familiar with the matter, before the Anthropic agreement was completed. The chain of contracts, from Hut 8 to Nvidia to Lambda to Anthropic, distributes the risk across four companies with very different business models.
For Lambda, the deal is a validation of its strategy. The company, which began as a GPU cloud for AI researchers, has been trying to win the kind of large enterprise contracts that have historically gone to Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The Anthropic agreement, at $35 billion, is the kind of order that changes a company’s trajectory, and Lambda can deliver it without building its own data centers, using capacity that Nvidia has secured. The fee Lambda pays Nvidia for the facility has not been disclosed, and people familiar with the matter said the terms are still being finalized.
For Hut 8, the deal confirms the pivot that has remade the company. The bitcoin miner, which built its business mining cryptocurrency, has been converting its expertise in power and site development into a data center business, and the Nueces County facility is one of its largest projects. The lease with Nvidia gives it a blue-chip counterparty and a stream of revenue that does not depend on the price of bitcoin. The company’s shares have risen sharply this year as investors have re-rated it as an AI infrastructure play.
For Anthropic, the agreement is a strategic hedge of a different kind. The company is preparing for what could be the largest initial public offering in history, with a valuation target of $2 trillion, according to people familiar with its plans. Its pitch to investors rests on the ability to secure compute capacity at predictable cost, and the Lambda deal, locking in capacity through 2031, gives it the supply certainty that IPO investors increasingly demand. The message to the market is that Anthropic has solved its hardest operational problem before asking for money.
The deal also illustrates the changing shape of the cloud industry. The big three cloud providers still dominate, but a second tier is emerging, built on AI-specific infrastructure and backed by the chip makers themselves. Nvidia’s investment in Lambda, combined with its willingness to lease capacity and pass it through, has created a new model: a chip company acting as the connective tissue of the AI economy.
The deal also raises questions about concentration. If Nvidia continues to control a growing share of the capacity its customers depend on, the industry’s most important resource will be controlled by one company, whatever the legal ownership structure says. Regulators in the United States and Europe have begun to examine Nvidia’s influence over the AI supply chain, and deals like this one, which extend its reach into leasing and financing, are likely to draw attention in that review.
Analysts said the deal will be watched closely for what it means for pricing. If Nvidia and Lambda can command large fees for bundled compute, the model will spread. If the arrangement proves uneconomic, it will be a cautionary tale about the complexity of AI financing. For now, the industry’s largest players are voting with their contracts, and the contracts say the future is expensive, layered and pre-paid years in advance. Anthropic, Lambda, Nvidia and Hut 8 each took a share of the risk, and each expects a share of the reward.
