Anthropic signs $35B Lambda cloud deal backed by Nvidia

Anthropic has committed $35 billion to Lambda, an Nvidia-backed cloud provider, for capacity at a data center Hut 8 is building in Nueces County, Texas. The Wall Street Journal reported the deal on August 31, citing people familiar with it. Nvidia holds the lease on the data center itself. The people said Nvidia signed an agreement with Hut 8 a few weeks earlier to lock in the capacity.

Reuters, citing a person familiar with the matter, put the project at about 350 megawatts. That person said the contract will bring Nvidia capacity online to meet growing demand for Claude. Reuters also described Anthropic as IPO-bound and building out compute for the demand it expects in products such as Claude Code.

Four companies are involved. Hut 8, a bitcoin miner that now also develops data centers, is building the site. Nvidia holds the lease. Lambda, which Nvidia backs, signed the contract with Anthropic. So Nvidia is involved twice: it is an investor in the provider Anthropic is paying, and it holds the lease on the building.

The Texas deal came less than a week after Anthropic said it would spend $45 billion to rent compute at Nscale’s West Virginia campus. That Nscale commitment was reported in August as running six years for about 460 MW, on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips, which start arriving late next year. Between them, the two contracts come to $80 billion for roughly 810 MW, and Anthropic has already signed both in the same week.

Anthropic says it trains and runs Claude on AWS Trainium, Google TPUs and Nvidia GPUs, and assigns each workload to the chips that suit it best. The company says this mix gives it better performance and more resilience. Amazon is still its primary cloud provider and training partner through Project Rainier.

Reuters also pointed to Hut 8’s earlier disclosures. In July, Hut 8 said it had signed a 15-year lease with an “investment-grade customer”, with a base-term contract value of $19.6 billion. The Financial Times later reported that Nvidia was the tenant for Hut 8’s 1-gigawatt Beacon Point campus.