Anthropic agrees to $35 billion cloud deal in Nvidia-backed arrangement

Anthropic has secured a $35 billion cloud-computing agreement with Lambda, backed by Nvidia, through an arrangement that gives Nvidia control of the lease for a new Texas data center being developed by Hut 8, according to people familiar with the deal.

The facility in Nueces County is being built by Hut 8, which operates both Bitcoin-mining and data-center businesses. Nvidia agreed several weeks ago to secure capacity at the site and will hold the lease, while Lambda will use the facility to install Nvidia chips and provide cloud services to Anthropic.

Lambda will purchase the Nvidia hardware and operate the computing infrastructure, with Nvidia also serving as an investor in the cloud provider. The amount Lambda will pay Nvidia to use the data-center space has not been disclosed.

The multilayered deal illustrates Nvidia’s expanding role beyond selling AI chips. The company is increasingly helping emerging cloud providers obtain data-center capacity and financing, making it easier for customers such as Anthropic to secure large amounts of computing power. For Lambda, the arrangement provides a path to deliver a major contract without having to acquire the underlying data-center capacity itself.

Anthropic’s agreement with Lambda is part of a broader effort to lock in infrastructure following a supply crunch earlier this year. Demand for the company’s AI products has increased rapidly, prompting it to sign increasingly large capacity agreements. Earlier this month, Anthropic agreed to a separate $45 billion deal with Nvidia-backed Nscale for Nvidia-powered capacity from a West Virginia facility.

Hut 8 is also building other data centers for Anthropic that will use Google’s competing tensor processing units. Google has provided financial guarantees to support those developments and help Hut 8 raise debt, putting competing Nvidia and Google hardware into separate facilities serving the same AI customer.

Hut 8 disclosed in July that an unnamed investment-grade customer had signed 15-year leases covering its entire 700-megawatt Texas campus. The company valued the facility at about $20 billion and said it would be designed around Nvidia chips, although it did not identify the customer.

Nvidia’s involvement also comes as it expands financing support for neocloud providers. The company announced in July that it would offer credit support to firms such as Lambda in exchange for a portion of their cloud revenue, though some deals under the program have since been paused. It is not known whether the Lambda-Anthropic arrangement includes a similar revenue-sharing requirement.