Anthropic locks in $10 billion of compute from Volta, a cloud startup that didn't exist six months ago
Quick Answer
Anthropic has secured a $10 billion computing capacity deal with Volta Infra Holdings, a nascent cloud startup, over six years.
Quick Take
The capacity, sourced from a hydropower-fed data center in Norway, will utilize Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, with a total of 1 gigawatt of power secured for future data centers.
Key Points
- Volta's capacity totals 133 megawatts, phased in by March 2027.
- The startup raised $300 million in venture capital, valuing it at $2.4 billion.
- Bitdeer's stock surged 14% following the announcement of the deal.
- Anthropic has existing agreements with major tech firms like Google and Amazon.
- Critics warn of risks from dependencies between chip suppliers and AI developers.
📖 Reader Mode
~1 min readAnthropic is locking in $10 billion worth of computing capacity from Volta Infra Holdings, a cloud startup that's only a few months old. The deal runs six years, according to Bloomberg. The compute comes from a data center in Tydal, Norway, where Bitcoin miner Bitdeer Technologies runs hydropower-fed infrastructure packed with Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin chips. Volta puts the capacity at 133 megawatts, with handoff happening in two phases through March 2027. The company says it has secured 1 gigawatt of power for data centers in the near term. Bitdeer's stock jumped 14 percent after the announcement.
Volta was founded in early 2026 by former managers from asset manager Brookfield. The company has raised $300 million in venture capital alongside the Anthropic deal, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter Capital. Nvidia and Michael Dell also invested, putting the valuation at $2.4 billion. On top of that, Volta has set up a $5 billion financing pool to help customers front the cost of expensive AI chips.
Anthropic is scaling its compute capacity aggressively. The company already has agreements in place with Google and Broadcom, Amazon, SpaceX, and AMD. Critics warn that the tangled dependencies between chip suppliers and AI developers could amplify losses if AI demand falls short of expectations. Volta itself shows the pattern well. Nvidia is both an investor in the startup and the supplier of the chips it deploys.
— Originally published at the-decoder.com
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