Anthropic signed a $35B cloud deal with Lambda, its third large compute contract
It follows a reported $45 billion agreement with Nscale and $10 billion with Volta. Nvidia is taking the lease on a Texas data centre from bitcoin miner Hut 8 to help supply it.
Anthropic has signed a $35 billion cloud agreement with Lambda, the Nvidia-backed compute provider, according to the Wall Street Journal. It is the third large compute contract the company has disclosed, after a reported $45 billion agreement with Nscale and a $10 billion deal with Volta.
As part of the arrangement, Nvidia is taking the lease on a data centre in Nueces County, Texas from Hut 8, the bitcoin miner that built it. Nvidia is therefore supplying the chips, financing the provider and holding the property lease underneath capacity sold to Anthropic.
Ninety billion dollars of obligations
Taken together the three contracts represent roughly $90 billion in multi-year commitments, against an annualised revenue run rate that reportedly passed $65 billion at the end of July. The obligations are the more rigid of the two figures: revenue can grow or stall, but a contracted compute commitment is owed either way.
That structural point is about to become a public one. Anthropic's S-1 is expected in late September, and these contracts will appear in it — long-dated, large relative to revenue, and concentrated among a handful of counterparties that are themselves financed by the company's chip supplier.
The strategic logic is straightforward enough. Frontier capability is gated on compute, and the labs that have secured multi-year capacity have effectively bought option value on their own roadmap. Anthropic is buying from providers other than the three hyperscalers, which keeps it from depending on companies that also sell competing models.
Nvidia on every side of the table
The more notable feature is how many roles Nvidia now plays in a single transaction. It manufactures the accelerators, has invested in Lambda, is putting about $2 billion into Nscale's $3.5 billion pre-IPO round, and holds the lease on the building.
This is vendor financing at industrial scale, and it is not improper — capital-intensive industries have always done it. But it makes the demand signal harder to read. When Nvidia forecasts roughly 70 percent revenue growth for fiscal 2028, as Jensen Huang did on 26 August, some portion of the underlying commitments come from customers Nvidia has itself capitalised. An outside analyst cannot easily separate demand that exists from demand that has been financed into existence.
It also concentrates systemic risk. If AI capital expenditure slows, the losses do not fall on independent parties: Nvidia holds equity in the providers, the lease on the buildings, and the receivables from the chips.
What is not disclosed
Neither Anthropic nor Lambda has said over what period the $35 billion is spread, what minimum commitments apply, how the capacity is priced against market rates, or whether the agreement contains take-or-pay terms. Hut 8 has not said what it received for the lease assignment.
Those terms determine whether $90 billion of contracts is a well-hedged supply strategy or an obligation that outlives the demand it was signed against. The S-1 will answer some of it. It will not answer all of it, because counterparty pricing is customarily redacted.
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