13 Sources
[1]
Anthropic signs $10 billion deal with AI cloud startup Volta
Anthropic has been on a cloud partnership spree in recent months and its latest move is reportedly a $10 billion deal with AI cloud startup Volta. Bloomberg originally reported that Volta, founded earlier this year, will provide cloud compute to the Claude maker over a six-year period. Volta has a partner in this deal, Bitdeer, a crypto-mining company that will help develop the data center to provide the compute capacity. That facility will be located in Norway, and will deliver an 133 megawatt capacity. It will be fueled by Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems, the chipmaker's state-of-the-art AI chip architecture. Volta is part of Nvidia's Cloud Partner program, which is a consortium of AI cloud providers who use Nvidia's GPUs in their data centers. Volta had spoken about a deal with an AI lab but hadn't named the specific company it was working with. Bloomberg originally cited anonymous sources familiar with the deal. TechCrunch reached out to Anthropic for more information. Anthropic has sought to aggressively expand its compute capacity over the last several months as it wages a corporate battle with its competitors. The company also recently announced new compute deals with the likes of SpaceX and Amazon.
[2]
Cloud startup Volta claims $10B AI lab deal for Norway bit barn
An AI cloud startup with backing from Nvidia and Michael Dell plans to open AI factories in Norway and elsewhere, targeting multiple gigawatts of capacity by 2030. Volta describes itself as a vertically integrated AI infrastructure business set up to finance, build, and operate AI factories. In other words, it is another rent-a-GPU "neocloud" operation like Nscale and CoreWeave, but one with some notable backers. Emerging from stealth mode, Volta said it had raised about $300 million across its seed and Series A rounds, reaching a valuation of $2.4 billion. Andreessen Horowitz and Nvidia led the latest round, with other investors including Michael Dell's family office. It also claims to have a $10 billion strategic partnership with an "AI lab" to build its AI factory located in Norway. This has been identified elsewhere as model developer giant Anthropic, which is said to be seeking access to Volta's compute resources over a six-year period. The Register asked for confirmation of this, and what that partnership comprises. Volta plans to develop the 133 MW facility with cryptocurrency miner and GPU cloud operator Bitdeer. The site is expected to use Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, presumably meaning the rack-scale infrastructure shown off by the GPU giant at the CES show earlier this year. "AI factory" is the industry's preferred term for a datacenter dedicated to training and running AI models. The Norway GPU barn is the first project within Volta's broader development pipeline, which it says exceeds 1 GW of capacity across North America and Europe. Volta says it intends to construct the sites using Nvidia's DSX reference architecture and software tooling, which cover the design, simulation, construction, and operation of AI factories. The technology includes digital twins that can model a facility before it is built. Perhaps in an effort to distinguish itself from the rest of the rent-a-GPU crowd, Volta claims rather grandiosely that it has created "the world's first fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform, extending beyond technology into capital formation." By this, Volta means combining infrastructure finance, datacenters, compute, software, and operations under one roof. It claims this will accelerate deployment and reduce financing costs. "Compute has become a new infrastructure asset class, with AI models and applications as the verticals built on top," said founder and CEO Ricard Boada. "Our ambition is to build The Utility of Compute so that compute works as reliably and invisibly as electricity, while being priced transparently and built to endure." Volta had not responded to our requests for further information by time of publication. Anthropic declined to comment. ®
[3]
AI cloud startup Volta valued at $2.4 billion, announces $10 billion AI partnership
Aug 4 (Reuters) - Volta Infra, a seven-month-old AI infrastructure startup, said it raised funds at a $2.4 billion valuation and landed a $10 billion contract with an unnamed AI company to provide cloud-computing services in Europe alongside Bitdeer Technologies (BTDR.O), opens new tab. The startup has also launched a $5 billion AI infrastructure program with asset manager Azora to finance AI "factories," it said in a statement, opens new tab on Tuesday. Here are some details: Reporting by Anzar Mehraj in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
[4]
Anthropic signs a $10bn compute deal with a week-old cloud startup
The six-year agreement with newly launched Volta adds another supplier to a compute list that already spans most of the industry. Anthropic has found another place to buy computing power, and this time it is a company barely old enough to have a logo. The AI developer has signed a $10bn, six-year deal with Volta, a cloud startup that only just launched, according to Bloomberg. The agreement is Volta's marquee contract and, for Anthropic, one more supplier on an already crowded list. It is the kind of deal that has become routine for a company whose appetite for compute seems to have no ceiling. Anthropic now buys capacity almost everywhere it can. Its biggest backer, Amazon, has put up to $25bn into the company and supplies much of its compute, and that is only the start of the list. The rest reads like a roll-call of the industry. Anthropic struck its biggest compute deal yet with Google and Broadcom as its run rate reached $30bn, and it has leaned heavily on Google's TPUs. While, AMD is investing $5bn and deploying two gigawatts of GPUs to run Claude, while CoreWeave, Akamai, and even SpaceX have all signed on to provide compute. Volta is not even the only $10bn deal in the mix. Anthropic has been in talks with Meta over a compute agreement of the same size, a measure of how many suppliers it takes to feed a single frontier lab. What makes the Volta deal stand out is how new the counterparty is. Anthropic is committing $10bn over six years to a startup founded this year, valued at $2.4bn, and only just out of stealth. Volta's idea is to make Nvidia's chips affordable to more than the giants, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, Nvidia, and Michael Dell. It plans to run Anthropic's capacity partly through the bitcoin miner Bitdeer, starting at a site in Norway. For Volta, the deal is validation and ballast at once. A $10bn anchor customer hands a days-old startup the credibility, and the cash flows, to raise and build against. For Anthropic, spreading its compute across many suppliers is a form of insurance. No single provider can meet its needs, and depending too heavily on any one, including its own investors, carries risks of its own. Diversifying is also about leverage; a lab that can shift workloads between Amazon, Google, AMD, and now a startup is less beholden to any one of them on price or priority. Anthropic has even explored building its own chips, the logical end point for a company that has decided compute is too important to leave entirely to others. The arrangements also feed a worry that has trailed the whole AI boom. Chipmakers and clouds increasingly help finance the customers who buy from them, an interlocking web that could magnify losses if demand disappoints. The scale of it all is hard to fathom. Anthropic's compute commitments now run to tens of billions of dollars, a bet that demand for Claude will keep climbing fast enough to justify the spend. The spending tracks the business. Anthropic's revenue has climbed sharply as Claude has won enterprise customers, which is what lets it sign commitments that would sink a smaller firm. Committing $10bn to a days-old company is not without risk, either. Volta still has to build and deliver, and Anthropic is effectively wagering that a first-time operator can execute at a scale established clouds find hard. The deal also hints at where the bottleneck now sits. Anthropic is chasing not just chips but the power and sites to run them, which is exactly what a firm like Volta, built by infrastructure financiers, is selling. For a company racing to keep Claude ahead, the maths is simple. Capacity is the constraint, and Anthropic will take it wherever it can find it, even from a startup that did not exist a year ago.
[5]
Nvidia and Dell back AI cloud startup Volta at a $2.4bn valuation
The AI cloud startup, valued at $2.4bn and backed by a16z, Altimeter, Nvidia, and Michael Dell, wants to bankroll access to costly compute. A new company wants to be the one that pays for everyone else's AI chips. Volta Infra Holdings has raised $300m in venture funding and lined up a further $5bn in financing to help a broader range of tech firms afford Nvidia's costly hardware, in a round that values it at $2.4bn. The raise was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter Capital, with Nvidia and Michael Dell also taking part. Volta's pitch is a financing problem dressed as a cloud company. Its founders argue that only the biggest firms with the strongest balance sheets can afford the upfront cost of cutting-edge chips, and Volta wants to spread that cost so smaller labs can compete. The model places Volta among the neoclouds, the wave of GPU-focused providers renting out AI compute, though its emphasis is as much on the money as the machines. A $5bn financing pool, arranged by the asset manager Azora from a mix of banks, is meant to bankroll its customers. The company was founded this year by Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio, both former executives in Brookfield's infrastructure business. 'We saw a massive opportunity and a massive gap in the market,' Boada, now chief executive, said. That background is the pitch. Building AI clouds has become as much a problem of power contracts, project finance, and bank relationships as of servers, and Volta's founders come from that world rather than from software. It is not starting small. Volta says it has already signed a $10bn, six-year contract to supply cloud capacity to a leading AI developer it declined to name, a marquee deal for a firm only months old. That contract will run partly on borrowed ground. It is to be delivered with Bitdeer, a bitcoin miner turned data-centre operator, using a 133-megawatt site in Norway, with further sites planned in Texas and Wyoming. The Bitdeer tie-up fits a wider shift. Bitcoin miners, sitting on cheap power and ready-built sites, have become unlikely landlords to the AI boom, repurposing infrastructure built for one gold rush to serve the next. There is a European thread here, too. The first big site sits in Norway, and the founders came out of infrastructure investing rather than pure tech, a reminder that the AI buildout is not only an American story. Power is the real constraint, and Volta has been securing it. The company says it has locked up a gigawatt of capacity in the near term, enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes, and is aiming for several gigawatts by 2030. Volta is one of many trying to grease the same wheels. Nvidia itself has offered startups compute now and payment later, and Broadcom, Apollo, and Blackstone have lined up to fund chips for Anthropic. Nvidia's fingerprints are all over this market. The chipmaker has topped $40bn in AI equity bets this year and has discussed backing hundreds of billions of dollars in chip purchases for OpenAI, blurring the line between supplier and financier. That blurring worries some. Critics call the arrangements circular, an interconnected web in which suppliers help fund the customers who buy their products, a structure that could magnify losses if AI demand falls short of the hype. Even Volta's backers had been sceptics. Andreessen Horowitz had largely avoided neoclouds and data-centre startups, but was won over by the founders' record in financing projects and securing power, according to managing partner Raghu Raghuram. Dell will act as a technology partner, supplying gear to Volta's sites and adding another established name to its roster. Success, Raghuram said, would depend on mastering 'the financial complexities of building and operating new clouds and selling to customers'. Not everyone will survive the boom. 'There's going to be so many dead bodies and so much consolidation eventually,' said Altimeter's Jamin Ball. Volta is betting that its banker relationships and blue-chip partners are what keep it upright when the tide turns.
[6]
Anthropic signs $10 billion computing deal with Volta Infra
Anthropic has signed a $10 billion, six-year agreement to use computing capacity from Volta Infra Holdings, a months-old AI infrastructure startup backed by Nvidia $NVDA, according to Bloomberg. Volta announced Tuesday that it had secured a $10 billion deal with an unnamed AI lab, with capacity to be delivered alongside Bitdeer Technologies Group at a data center site in Norway offering 133 megawatts of capacity powered by Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips. Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, identified the AI lab as Anthropic. Anthropic declined to comment, and Volta did not respond to a request for comment, according to Reuters. Volta was founded in January by former executives from Brookfield Asset Management, the company said. Its investors include Azora, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, and Nvidia. The startup raised $300 million across a seed round and Series A financing, valuing it at $2.4 billion. Volta also announced a separate $5 billion AI infrastructure program with asset manager Azora to finance future data center projects. The Norway site is the first in a development pipeline that the company said exceeds one gigawatt of near-term power capacity across North America and Europe. Bitdeer stock rose nearly 10% in premarket trading Tuesday. The Bitcoin mining company has been redirecting some of its facilities away from crypto work and toward AI infrastructure. Anthropic has been pursuing arrangements with other technology companies to expand its computing capacity as demand for its products grows. Those arrangements include deals with SpaceX, Advanced Micro Devices, and Akamai $AKAM Technologies. Separately, Anthropic is in discussions to lease computing power from Meta $META's data centers, a potential deal that could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years.
[7]
AI cloud start-up Volta valued at $2.4bn, inks $10bn Anthropic deal
The start-up has secured a deal to provide Anthropic with computing capacity for six years, according to a Bloomberg report. Volta Infra, a new AI infrastructure start-up, has emerged from stealth with a valuation of $2.4bn after completing a seed funding round and Series A round led by Azora, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter and Nvidia. The rounds also saw participation from strategic investors including the family office of Michael Dell and Matter Venture Partners. Volta, founded earlier this year by Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio, aims to help top AI labs and start-ups access key infrastructure. The company develops, finances, builds and operates AI factories by integrating "institutional capital, powered land, data centres, compute, software and operations under a single platform". The months-old start-up raised $300m in venture funding according to Bloomberg, while the company also announced a deal with asset company Azora to provide $5bn of financing for the "next generation of AI factories" developed by Volta. "Compute has become a new infrastructure asset class, with AI models and applications as the verticals built on top," said Ricard Boada. "Every technology revolution has run on a physical layer beneath it. "We founded Volta because compute should be financed, developed, and commercialised with the principles and scale of infrastructure." The start-up also announced that it has secured a $10bn strategic partnership with an unnamed AI lab to develop an AI factory in Norway alongside Bitdeer, a Bitcoin miner that operates data centres. The project - the first within Volta's broader development pipeline - will comprise a 133MW deployment powered by Nvidia Vera Rubin systems. As well as the site in Norway, Volta plans to build sites in Texas and Wyoming, Boada told Bloomberg. The start-up aims to deploy multiple gigawatts of capacity by 2030. Bloomberg reported that the unnamed AI lab involved in the $10bn Norway site deal is actually AI giant Anthropic, with the publication citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. As part of the deal, Anthropic will reportedly have access to Volta's computing capacity at the site for six years. Anthropic has recently been making a series of deals to boost its access to vital AI infrastructure and compute. Just a couple of weeks ago, the company announced a partnership with AMD for 2GW of its latest-generation chips in a bid to boost AI capacity and meet growing demands. The Wall Street Journal reported that the deal between the companies is worth "tens of billions of dollars". Anthropic has also made similar deals with Broadcom and Amazon. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
[8]
The AI Boom's Latest Winner: A Brand-New Startup That Just Landed a $10 Billion Deal With Anthropic
Though the deal has yet to be made public, Bloomberg learned that Anthropic's contract centers around access to a data center managed by Volta. This is exactly Volta's business -- it's all about supplying the behind-the-scenes tech that is powering the AI revolution. The company's website says it thinks "Compute should be a utility. Not a bottleneck" and promises it's "developing, financing, and operating AI factories at global scale." Not much else has been reported about the California-based startup, though the U.K.'s Times newspaper noted that its cofounder and CEO Ricard Boada Rafart, a Spaniard living in the U.K., set up the company with a single £1 of share capital. Anthropic has been trying to keep up with increasing demand for its AI products like its Claude chatbot, Bloomberg reported, and the deal is the latest maneuver by the large firm to gain access to computer power. Anthropic has also signed deals with other suppliers to gain access to powerful AI computer resources, including Elon Musk's SpaceX. SpaceX absorbed Musk's AI outfit XAI prior to its recent IPO, and has long term plans to put AI processing servers in orbit as part of its Starmind project. Volta, for its part, did not acknowledge Anthropic's interest to Bloomberg. But in a LinkedIn post, Boada acknowledged a "$10 billion strategic partnership with a leading AI lab to develop an AI Factory in Europe, generating approximately $1.7 billion of annual revenue for Volta." He also explained that the company's belief is simply that "AI infrastructure needs both technology and institutional capital. One without the other isn't enough."
[9]
Nvidia-backed AI startup seals $10b Anthropic deal
AI firm Anthropic has secured a significant computing capacity deal. This agreement is valued at ten billion dollars and spans six years. The contract is with infrastructure startup Volta Infra Holdings, which is Nvidia-backed. This move aims to meet the growing demand for Anthropic's AI products. The deal marks a substantial investment in future AI development capabilities. Anthropic PBC has struck a $10 billion deal for computing capacity from a months-old infrastructure startup, according to people familiar with the matter, marking the Claude maker's latest effort to keep pace with demand for its products. The company has signed a contract to use a data centre managed by Nvidia-backed cloud startup Volta Infra Holdings , said the people, who requested anonymity as the deal is not public. Volta said on Tuesday that it had secured a $10 billion deal with an unnamed AI lab. The agreement runs for six years, it said.
[10]
AI cloud startup Volta valued at $2.4 billion, announces $10 billion AI partnership
Volta Infra, a new AI startup, secured a significant cloud contract. This deal is reportedly with Anthropic for European cloud computing services. The company also launched a substantial AI infrastructure program for factories. Volta Infra raised substantial seed and Series A funding from major investors. This expansion aims to meet the growing demand for AI computing power. Volta Infra, a seven-month-old AI infrastructure startup, said it raised funds at a $2.4 billion valuation and landed a $10 billion contract with an unnamed AI company to provide cloud-computing services in Europe alongside Bitdeer Technologies. The startup has also launched a $5 billion AI infrastructure program with asset manager Azora to finance AI "factories," it said in a statement on Tuesday. Here are some details: Bloomberg News reported that the Nvidia-backed Volta's $10 billion cloud contract is with Anthropic, citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters has not been able to independently verify the report. The six-year agreement covers computing capacity at a data center operated by crypto mining firm Bitdeer in Norway with 133 megawatts of capacity powered by Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, the report said. Anthropic declined to comment and Volta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. AI companies have been spending heavily on computing infrastructure needed to run large language models. Volta said the Norway project is the first in a development pipeline exceeding one gigawatt of near-term power capacity across North America and Europe. The startup raised $300 million in a seed round and Series A financing, the Bloomberg report said. The rounds were led by Azora, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter and Nvidia, Volta said. Anthropic has signed a series of computing and investment agreements with companies including SpaceX, Advanced Micro Devices, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon.com and Micron Technology.
[11]
Volta Exits Stealth at $2.4 Billion Valuation to Build AI Infrastructure | PYMNTS.com
The company's fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform brings together institutional infrastructure capital, powered land, data centers, compute, software and operations. With this platform, Volta develops, finances, builds and operates AI factories, it said in a Tuesday (Aug. 4) press release. Volta completed a seed round and a Series A that value the company at $2.4 billion, according to the release. The company also formed a partnership with an AI lab to develop an AI factory in Norway, per the release. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that the unnamed AI lab with which Volta struck the $10 billion deal is Anthropic. The six-year deal will see Anthropic use a data center managed by Volta, according to the report. Volta also has a broader development pipeline that exceeds 1 gigawatt of near-term power capacity across North America and Europe, and the company has established an AI Infrastructure Program with asset manager Azora to provide $5 billion of financing for AI factories, per the release. Volta Co-Founder and CEO Ricard Boada said in the release that compute has become a new infrastructure asset class and that Volta aims to make compute reliable and transparently priced. "We founded Volta because compute should be financed, developed and commercialized with the principles and scale of infrastructure," Boada said. Volta Co-Founder and Chief Corporate Development Officer Sofia Gumuzio said in the release that meeting the demand for compute "requires a platform that can mobilize infrastructure capital, secure power and execute at industrial scale while moving at the pace of AI innovation. That's what Volta was built to do." Volta's Series A round was co-led by Azora, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter and Nvidia, according to the release. Andreessen Horowitz said in a Tuesday post on LinkedIn that Volta makes compute accessible to startups by assembling the credit support, project equity and debt behind each deployment. "We're excited to partner with Ricard Boada, Sofia Gumuzio and the Volta team as they expand access to AI infrastructure and ensure startups can compete alongside the industry's largest players," Andreessen Horowitz said in the post. It was reported in July that the five companies spending the most on AI data centers in the United States doubled their debt load over the past five years to finance their efforts. In total, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle added about $350 billion to their debt obligations. For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.
[12]
Anthropic Inks $10 billion computing deal with new cloud startup Volta Infra
Anthropic has secured ten billion dollars in computing capacity from Volta Infra Holdings. This deal aims to meet the growing demand for Anthropic's artificial intelligence products. Volta Infra Holdings is an infrastructure startup backed by Nvidia. The agreement spans six years and involves a data center in Norway. This move highlights the significant investment required for AI development and expansion. Anthropic PBC has struck a $10 billion deal for computing capacity from a months-old infrastructure startup, according to people familiar with the matter, marking the Claude maker's latest effort to keep pace with demand for its products. The AI developer has signed a contract to use a data center managed by Nvidia Corp.-backed cloud startup Volta Infra Holdings Ltd., said the people, who requested anonymity as the deal is not public. Volta said earlier Tuesday that it had secured a $10 billion deal with an unnamed AI lab to be delivered in partnership with Bitdeer Technologies Group, a Bitcoin miner that operates data centers, using a site in Norway. The agreement runs for six years, it said. Volta Chief Executive Officer Ricard Boada declined to name the client. Representatives for Anthropic and Bitdeer declined to comment. Anthropic has moved aggressively in recent months to shore up its computing resources as more businesses and consumers turn to its tools to streamline coding and other tasks. It has inked computing agreements with Elon Musk's SpaceX, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Akamai Technologies Inc. The AI developer is also in discussions to lease computing power from Meta Platforms Inc.'s data centers, Bloomberg News has reported. Anthropic raised $65 billion in a funding round earlier this year to help cover the immense cost of AI development. It's also considering tapping the public markets for capital with a Wall Street debut as soon as this year. The data center site in Norway offers 133 megawatts of capacity and will be stocked with Nvidia's newest Vera Rubin chips, Volta said. Founded in January by former executives from Brookfield Asset Management Ltd, Volta leases AI capacity and helps clients finance deals for costly chips. The startup announced Tuesday that it raised $300 million in venture funding, valuing it at $2.4 billion. Volta's partner, Bitdeer, is among a growing number of Bitcoin mining companies that are converting some of their data centers from minting the cryptocurrency to supporting AI applications as Bitcoin prices slump. Bitdeer plans to convert some of its crypto sites in Texas, Tennessee and Washington state, according to a monthly operational update by the company on July 21. Anthropic and rival OpenAI have relied on a mix of large tech firms and newer cloud-computing startups to help build out the data center capacity they see as necessary for developing better AI systems and supporting wider adoption. OpenAI's Sam Altman has previously said he expects the company to spend "trillions" on physical infrastructure for AI. The startup is currently planning a new data center in Georgia that may cost more than $30 billion. Nvidia is also in discussions to help OpenAI lease a $500 billion, 10-gigawatt hub that SoftBank Group Corp. is overseeing in Ohio, Bloomberg News has reported. Over the past year, a number of financing arrangements involving OpenAI and Anthropic have been criticized for being circular in nature. These deals create an increasingly interconnected web of dependencies between technology suppliers and AI developers that risks magnifying losses if AI demand fails to live up to the lofty expectations.
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Anthropic secures compute power in multi-billion dollar Norway data center deal By Investing.com
Investing.com -- A massive new infrastructure agreement is set to bring substantial AI computing capacity to a newly announced data center in Norway, utilizing a multi-tiered arrangement spanning real estate, hardware, and cloud services. The deal bridges cloud infrastructure startup Volta with data center operator Bitdeer. Following the announcement of the agreement, shares of Bitdeer jumped 14%. While the end-user was kept officially confidential in corporate announcements, Bloomberg reports that Anthropic is the unnamed "leading AI lab" involved in the project. According to Bloomberg's sources, the Claude developer has struck a $10 billion, six-year contract with Volta Infra Holdings to secure the computing capacity needed to keep pace with soaring demand for its products. The physical backbone of this operation will be located in Tydal, Norway, and managed by Bitdeer. In a press release on Tuesday, Bitdeer detailed a 16-year colocation lease with Volta worth approximately $4.7 billion in initial contracted revenue. The contract includes an 8-year extension option that could increase the potential total contract value to $8 billion over 24 years. The agreement guarantees Volta and its end-user a purpose-built facility running on 100% renewable hydropower. The financial obligations are supported by a $1.3 billion credit backstop anticipated to be arranged by J.P. Morgan and another major global financial institution. Upon completion, the Tydal facility is slated to be one of Norway's largest and most efficient AI data centers. It will offer 133 megawatts of gross capacity to support a 121-megawatt IT load configured entirely for the AI lab. The infrastructure will feature hardware supplied by Dell Technologies and will be stocked with Nvidia's newest Vera Rubin chips. The project is scheduled to be delivered in two equal phases, with target commencement dates of December 31, 2026, and March 31, 2027.
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AI cloud startup Volta, valued at $2.4 billion and barely seven months old, has secured a $10 billion, six-year compute deal with Anthropic. Backed by Nvidia and Michael Dell, Volta will deliver AI infrastructure through a 133-megawatt Norway facility built with crypto miner Bitdeer, marking one of the largest AI partnerships for a newly launched company.
Anthropichas signed a $10 billion, six-year compute deal with Volta, an AI cloud startup that emerged from stealth mode this year
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. The AI partnership represents one of the largest contracts for a company barely seven months old, adding another major supplier to Anthropic's already extensive list of cloud compute capacity providers. Bloomberg originally reported the deal, citing anonymous sources familiar with the arrangement, though Anthropic declined to comment when contacted2
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Source: The Next Web
Volta raised approximately $300 million across its seed and Series A funding rounds, reaching a valuation of $2.4 billion
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. Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter Capital co-led the latest round, with Nvidia and Michael Dell's family office also participating as investors. The AI cloud startup positions itself as a vertically integrated AI infrastructure business designed to finance, build, and operate AI factories. Founded by Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio, both former executives in Brookfield's infrastructure business, Volta combines infrastructure finance, data centers, compute, software, and operations under one roof2
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Source: PYMNTS
Volta plans to develop a 133-megawatt facility in Norway with cryptocurrency miner and GPU cloud operator Bitdeer to deliver the cloud compute capacity for Anthropic
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. The site will be fueled by Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems, the chipmaker's state-of-the-art AI chip architecture showcased at CES earlier this year. Volta is part of Nvidia's Cloud Partner program, a consortium of AI cloud providers who use Nvidia AI chips in their data centers1
. The Norway facility represents the first project within Volta's broader development pipeline, which exceeds 1 gigawatt of capacity across North America and Europe2
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Source: The Register
Anthropichas aggressively expanded its compute capacity over recent months as it competes with rivals in the AI model training space
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. The Claude maker now sources capacity from nearly every major provider in the industry. Amazon, its biggest backer with up to $25 billion invested, supplies much of its compute4
. Anthropic also struck its largest compute deal with Google and Broadcom as its run rate reached $30 billion, leaning heavily on Google's TPUs. AMD is investing $5 billion and deploying two gigawatts of GPUs to run Claude, while CoreWeave, Akamai, and SpaceX have all signed agreements to provide compute4
. Anthropic has even explored building its own chips, viewing compute as too critical to leave entirely to external suppliers.Related Stories
Volta launched a $5 billion AI infrastructure program with asset manager Azora to finance AI factories, arranged from a mix of banks
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. The company's pitch centers on solving a financing problem: only the biggest firms with the strongest balance sheets can afford the upfront cost of cutting-edge Nvidia AI chips, and Volta wants to spread that cost so smaller labs can compete5
. Volta says it has secured a gigawatt of capacity in the near term and aims for several gigawatts by 20305
. The startup intends to construct sites using Nvidia's DSX reference architecture and software tooling, which cover design, simulation, construction, and operation of AI factories, including digital twins that can model facilities before construction2
.The $10 billion deal highlights how compute has become the primary constraint for frontier AI labs, with Anthropic willing to commit massive sums to a first-time operator barely out of stealth
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. For Volta, the contract provides both validation and cash flows to raise and build against. Diversifying suppliers gives Anthropic leverage on pricing and priority, reducing dependence on any single provider including its own investors4
. However, the arrangements feed concerns about circular financing, where chipmakers and clouds increasingly help finance the customers who buy from them—an interlocking web that could magnify losses if AI demand disappoints4
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. Nvidia has topped $40 billion in AI equity bets this year and discussed backing hundreds of billions in chip purchases for OpenAI, blurring the line between supplier and financier5
. Altimeter's Jamin Ball warned there will be "so many dead bodies and so much consolidation eventually," with Volta betting its banker relationships and blue-chip partners will keep it standing when the market shifts5
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