Anthropic inks $35B cloud agreement with this NVIDIA-backed company
What's the story
Anthropic has signed a massive $35 billion cloud-computing deal with Lambda, a cloud provider backed by NVIDIA, for a Texas data center. The deal will enable Anthropic to meet the growing demand for its Claude AI product. The project is being developed in Nueces County by Hut 8, an AI data center company that transitioned from crypto-mining.
Partnership details
Hut 8 signed 15-year lease deal with an investment-grade customer
The Wall Street Journal first reported the deal, noting that NVIDIA itself would hold the lease on the data center.
Hut 8 had previously signed a 15-year lease deal with an "investment-grade customer" for a base-term contract value of $19.6 billion.
The Financial Times later revealed that NVIDIA was the tenant for Hut 8's Beacon Point campus, which has a capacity of one gigawatt.
Program suspension
NVIDIA suspended some deals under its financing initiative
NVIDIA has suspended some deals under its new financing initiative that provided credit support to AI cloud companies in exchange for a share of revenue.
The chip giant stepped back from the program last week, but an NVIDIA spokesperson said, "The new business model... that opens up compute access to the fast-growing AI ecosystem is still in place and continues to evolve due to high demand."
Revenue sharing
Concerns over potential antitrust scrutiny
NVIDIA's model allowed it to rent compute capacity back from cloud customers if they couldn't sell it, providing them a guaranteed buyer.
It also enabled smaller AI cloud firms to borrow capital needed for purchasing NVIDIA's AI chips.
Under the model, NVIDIA would earn revenue on hardware sales and a share of customers' cloud revenues derived from NVIDIA-powered capacity.
However, some employees expressed concerns about potential antitrust scrutiny over this initiative.