Inside Anthropic's $35 Billion Bet on Nvidia's Cloud

A $35 billion, six-year agreement with Nvidia-backed Lambda extends Anthropic’s compute campaign and casts new light on Nvidia’s expanding grip over AI infrastructure financing.

Key Takeaways

• Anthropic has committed $35 billion over six years to Nvidia-backed Lambda, its third major compute agreement in a month as Claude’s revenue climbs toward a $65 billion run rate.
• Nvidia appears as investor, chip supplier and reported landlord in the same transaction, a structure that ties Lambda’s fortunes and Anthropic’s growth to a single counterparty.
• Hut 8 shares rose sharply on the news, extending gains built on SEC-disclosed leases at its Texas campus worth up to $50.2 billion if every renewal option is exercised.

The Shape of the Agreement

Anthropic has agreed to pay Lambda, the Nvidia-backed cloud computing provider, roughly $35 billion over six years for access to artificial intelligence computing capacity. The Wall Street Journal broke the story Monday, citing people familiar with the matter; Reuters and Agence France-Presse each confirmed elements of it through their own sources within hours. Neither Anthropic nor Lambda has said a word publicly, which is by now the customary silence surrounding deals of this size in an industry where confirmation often arrives only once the infrastructure is already being poured in concrete.

The compute itself will originate in Nueces County, Texas, at a data center Hut 8 Corp is raising as part of its Beacon Point campus outside Corpus Christi. The arrangement, as described in reporting, has three distinct layers: Nvidia leases the physical facility from Hut 8, Lambda installs Nvidia’s chips inside it, and Anthropic then pays Lambda for the finished capacity. What Lambda pays Nvidia for the privilege of occupying that space has not surfaced, and the structure leaves Anthropic without a direct contractual relationship to the very company whose silicon powers everything it rents.

A Buildout Without Pause

The Lambda commitment did not arrive as an isolated event. It arrived as the latest entry in a ledger that has been filling for months. Five days prior, Anthropic pledged roughly $45 billion over six years to Nscale, the British infrastructure developer, for 460 megawatts of capacity at a West Virginia campus engineered around Nvidia’s forthcoming Vera Rubin systems, a commitment West Virginia’s governor confirmed publicly. Both agreements trace back to a November 2025 partnership in which Nvidia and Microsoft together pledged $15 billion into Anthropic in exchange for a $30 billion Azure commitment and access to a further gigawatt of Nvidia-powered capacity, a framework since supplemented by smaller arrangements with Advanced Micro Devices and the cloud startup Volta.

What explains the velocity is not simple appetite. It is arithmetic. Anthropic disclosed to investors that its annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion by the end of July, up from $47 billion in May and roughly $9 billion at the close of 2025, a trajectory that now places it ahead of OpenAI’s own run rate near $40 billion. Actual second-quarter revenue exceeded $11.5 billion, more than fourteen times the $787 million recorded twelve months earlier, and the company reported its first positive quarterly operating income in the same period. Growth of that magnitude has outpaced the infrastructure built to serve it, and the shortage that constrained Claude’s availability earlier this year has left Anthropic contracting with newer entrants once established hyperscalers reached their own ceilings.

Nvidia on Every Side

What separates the Lambda transaction from the rest of this year’s compute deals is not its size but its geometry. Nvidia has held equity in Lambda since its 2025 Series D round and stayed in the syndicate through Lambda’s November Series E, led by TWG Global; the same month, it became an investor in Anthropic as well. The Financial Times has reported that Nvidia is also the previously unnamed hyperscaler behind Hut 8’s Beacon Point leases, which would place the chipmaker simultaneously as supplier, financier and landlord within a single supply chain feeding a single customer.

The property terms underneath that speculation are, unusually, a matter of public record. Hut 8’s SEC filings describe two 15-year, triple-net leases at Beacon Point spanning a combined 704 megawatts, worth $19.6 billion across their base terms and as much as $50.2 billion should every renewal option be exercised. Across its wider portfolio, which includes a Louisiana campus leased to Fluidstack, Hut 8 has disclosed 949 megawatts of contracted capacity and roughly $26.6 billion in aggregate base-term value, financed partly through $7.5 billion of investment-grade project debt that carries no recourse to the parent company. Hut 8 has never named its Beacon Point tenant, describing it only as an investment-grade hyperscaler, and both Hut 8 and Nvidia have declined to confirm the Financial Times account.

How the Market Priced It

Investors treated the news as a modest but genuine positive for the infrastructure side of the trade. Hut 8 shares climbed as much as 4 percent to $81.60 within hours of the Journal’s report, extending a rally that has already drawn a string of price-target increases from Wall Street desks. Morgan Stanley initiated coverage last month at Overweight with a target of $263, while Piper Sandler, Benchmark and Keefe Bruyette pushed their own estimates into a range between $143 and $245. Nvidia’s shares, by comparison, barely stirred, closing 1.36 percent higher at $220.50, the muted response of a stock whose roughly $5.3 trillion valuation, the largest of any public company on earth, already assumes a great deal of what this deal confirms.

Not every voice on the sell side read the news as unambiguously reassuring. Mizuho’s Jordan Klein described the layered financing behind it as concerning, a note that echoes language the Bank for International Settlements used in its own 2026 assessment of financial stability risk, where it singled out AI-related financing among the threats worth watching. The unease is structural rather than sentimental: Nvidia’s capital funds Lambda, Lambda’s revenue depends on Anthropic, and Anthropic’s growth in turn generates the very chip demand that justifies Nvidia’s original investment, a circuit with little room for outside price discovery at any point along its length. Lambda, still private, expects roughly $1.5 billion in revenue this year, a figure dwarfed by the multi-year obligation it has just assumed from Anthropic alone.

The Question Investors Will Ask

For Anthropic, the arrangement buys time before a listing widely expected this autumn. The company filed a confidential draft registration with the SEC on June 1, retaining Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, and closed a $65 billion Series H round in May at a $965 billion post-money valuation led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital. Investors weighing that offering will need to look past the sheer scale of Anthropic’s compute commitments, which across Microsoft, Nscale and Lambda alone now exceed $150 billion, toward the credit quality that actually stands behind them, given that Anthropic carries no public debt rating of its own and several of its newest counterparties do not either.

For Nvidia, the Lambda deal extends a strategy already visible in its dealings with CoreWeave and Nebius, using the strength of its own balance sheet to convert AI demand into leases that, in turn, secure years of future chip orders. Lambda is meanwhile financing part of its expansion through roughly $920 million in chip-backed debt while pursuing a pre-IPO round that could raise as much as $3 billion at a valuation above $12 billion, nearly double where it stood in November, ahead of a possible listing in 2027. That arrangement binds Lambda’s own solvency to the same cycle it was built to serve, and it is the question institutional capital will keep returning to as this generation of leases, and the debt quietly underwriting them, comes due for renewal.