The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on the 31st (local time), citing sources familiar with the matter, that Anthropic signed a $35 billion (about 47.9 trillion won) cloud computing contract with cloud startup Lambda, which received investment from Nvidia.
As a result, with Nvidia's backing, Anthropic secured 700 MW (megawatts) of computing capacity at a data center in Nueces County, Texas, operated by Lambda. The data center, which infrastructure developer Hut 8 is developing, is currently under a leasehold held by Nvidia.
Under the arrangement, Nvidia's investment funds are used to purchase Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) and build the data center, and Anthropic uses the data center leased by Nvidia, prompting observations that Nvidia is expanding an AI industry "circular financing" structure it is leading.
WSJ explained that because Anthropic is unlisted and has a low credit rating, Nvidia supported it to help secure expensive semiconductor resources reliably. Given Anthropic's current credit, it would be difficult to strike such a deal on its own, so Nvidia effectively secured the leasehold on its behalf.
Nvidia's provision of computing infrastructure to corporations in AI is seen as a move to maintain the market dominance of its chips.
Earlier, Anthropic also signed a deal to lease, for $45 billion (about 61.5 trillion won), a 460 MW data center in West Virginia operated by British data center corporations nScale, which is backed by Nvidia.