Anthropic's $35B Lambda Compute Deal Puts Nvidia on Every Side

A $35 billion lease with Nvidia at every layer

Anthropic has taken on another large compute contract. The Claude developer agreed to rent about $35 billion of GPU capacity from Lambda, a cloud provider backed by Nvidia, over six years. The capacity sits at a Texas data center that Hut 8 is building.12 The Wall Street Journal first reported the deal, and later coverage agrees on the main terms. The site is a campus of about 350 megawatts in Nueces County, near Corpus Christi, and several outlets say Nvidia holds the lease on the building.1715 Anthropic declined to comment. Nvidia, Lambda and Hut 8 did not answer early requests.11

The dollar figure is not the most important part of this story. The structure is. Reporting describes a chain with four links: Hut 8 builds the facility, Nvidia leases it, Lambda provides the compute, and Anthropic uses it. Lambda pays Nvidia an undisclosed sum for that access.12 Nvidia invests in Lambda, supplies its chips, and is also an equity backer of Anthropic. That gives the chipmaker a financial stake on several sides of one deal.1213

Not every outlet describes the building lease the same way. Most say Nvidia is the tenant. One data-center analysis says Lambda holds the Hut 8 lease and Anthropic only rents the compute.16 Nvidia has not confirmed the details in public. Its spokespeople have pointed instead to the company's DSX reference architecture for coordinating data-center buildouts.19 The account backed by most reporting is that Nvidia is the tenant. If that is right, the chipmaker is now acting as a landlord.

Why the lease structure matters

Capacity Media gives the clearest explanation of the setup: it fixes a credit problem. Neither Anthropic nor Lambda has a balance sheet that would make a developer comfortable signing a lease worth tens of billions of dollars. Nvidia does. With Nvidia as the anchor tenant, Hut 8 gets an investment-grade counterparty, Nvidia gets a guaranteed home for its chips, and Lambda gets a huge campus without having to sign the lease or raise all the money itself.19

One more detail adds to the circularity. Nvidia has reportedly agreed, in a separate deal worth about $1.5 billion, to lease some of its own chips back from Lambda.18 Nvidia's disclosures show how big this exposure has become. It ended the second quarter of fiscal 2027 with $279 billion in supply obligations and $108.5 billion in guarantee obligations tied to AI cloud and data-center partners.13

The obvious criticism is circular financing. Nvidia funds AI companies, and those companies spend the money on Nvidia hardware. Demand looks organic, but part of it is self-generated.13 One analysis noted, somewhat drily, that three of Anthropic's new landlords are portfolio companies of its main chip supplier, and that markets have chosen not to worry about that.16 That calm looks fragile to me. The risk runs in both directions. If Anthropic's growth stalls, Nvidia could take losses through its equity stake, its guarantees and weaker chip orders, all at once.13

One deal in a string of rentals

The Lambda contract is part of a series of rentals. Days earlier, Anthropic signed a six-year deal worth about $45 billion with London-based Nscale for roughly 460 megawatts in Mason County, West Virginia.1214 It has also signed a $50 billion deal with Fluidstack and a $45 billion arrangement with SpaceX.11 The SpaceX deal gives Anthropic all of the Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, which has more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.1620 Before these, there was a $19 billion, 401-megawatt lease with TeraWulf in Kentucky.15

The running totals depend on who is counting. One tally puts Anthropic's 2026 commitments at $135 billion or more across four leases.1216 Capacity counts $175 billion across the Lambda, Nscale, Fluidstack and SpaceX deals.19 Nvidia has put the figure even higher. It said Anthropic has secured 2.6 gigawatts of AI infrastructure worth more than $180 billion through traditional and newer cloud providers, with delivery expected by the end of 2028.14 The numbers differ mainly because each count includes different deals. Even the smallest one is far beyond anything an AI lab had committed until recently.

These neocloud deals are the smaller part of Anthropic's spending plan. A confidential IPO prospectus reviewed by Reuters reportedly shows at least $518 billion in infrastructure spending over about ten years. That includes $111.1 billion with Google, $110 billion with Amazon and $31.4 billion with Microsoft. Around 80% of the total is non-cancellable or payable whether or not the capacity is used.20 Separately, Anthropic reportedly has more than a dozen letters of intent with US data-center developers and has committed to rent more than 10 gigawatts from cloud providers.17

The equity behind the leases

The funding side explains how Anthropic can sign these contracts. In February 2026, the company closed a $30 billion Series G at a $380 billion post-money valuation, led by GIC and Coatue.1 In late May, it raised a $65 billion Series H at $965 billion, led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia.10 About $15 billion of that round was money hyperscalers had already committed, including $5 billion from Amazon.5 Alphabet separately agreed to invest up to $40 billion, with $30 billion tied to performance targets.5 In total, Anthropic has raised more than $120 billion in equity across eight lettered rounds and ten strategic investments.2

Nvidia's equity role started earlier. In November 2025, it committed up to $10 billion, and Microsoft committed up to $5 billion. Anthropic agreed in return to buy $30 billion of Azure compute.20 Nvidia is now reportedly negotiating to anchor as much as $10 billion of Anthropic's IPO.13 That listing could raise around $100 billion at a valuation near $2 trillion.913 Its timing has moved more than once, from an after-Labor Day target to a window around the November midterms.3

Revenue is real, which is what makes this credible. Anthropic reported an annualized run rate above $30 billion in April, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025.20 By mid-May, the run rate had passed $47 billion.9 Spending is growing too: Anthropic spent more than $7 billion on compute and infrastructure in 2025 and posted an operating loss above $8 billion.20

Lambda's backlog and its own funding round

The contract also changes Lambda's fundraising picture. An investor letter seen by the Wall Street Journal reportedly showed Lambda's order backlog jumping from $15 billion in June to $50 billion in September. That $35 billion rise matches the Anthropic deal almost exactly.18 Reports on Lambda's raise differ. Earlier coverage said it wanted up to $3 billion at a valuation of $12 billion or more.1117 Later reports say it wants up to $4 billion at a $14.5 billion pre-money valuation, led by Coatue and Blackstone.18 The later, larger figure looks like the current one, and the jump fits a company that just quadrupled its backlog ahead of a planned IPO.17

A backlog is not revenue. Lambda still has to buy hardware, bring the capacity online and deliver service before contracts become cash.18 Nscale's IPO filing is a warning here. It said its Anthropic agreements could produce about $44.6 billion in payments, but it still needed to secure financing for the GPUs and the facility, and it had no binding commitments when it filed.15

What to make of it

The main conclusion is that the limiting factor in the AI race has moved. For frontier labs, buying compute is now the single largest capital decision.12 But the hard part is no longer getting GPUs. It is assembling everything around them: land, power, cooling and financing, plus counterparties that can actually deliver hundreds of megawatts.15 Lenders are adjusting. Tenant credit quality used to depend on one company's balance sheet. Now it depends on a chain of chipmaker guarantees, neocloud middlemen and sponsor equity, and much of that chain leads back to the same few companies.19

The layered structure lowers Anthropic's direct real-estate risk but adds more counterparties it depends on. A delay at Hut 8's Texas site or a change in Nvidia's lease terms would flow down the chain.12 In practice, Nvidia is lending its balance sheet to keep the AI buildout financeable, at a time when it reportedly cut its guarantee for OpenAI's proposed Ohio project from about $250 billion to under $120 billion.19

For now, the arrangement holds together because Anthropic's revenue keeps rising. The test will come when public investors examine a $2 trillion valuation built on about half a trillion dollars of mostly fixed obligations. At that point, the market will have to decide whether this network of interlocking commitments is sound or the sign of a bubble.