Anthropic Signs $35 Billion Nvidia-Backed Lambda Deal, AI Compute Spending Now Tops $250 Billion

Anthropic has added another giant computing contract to its ledger. The Claude maker signed a $35 billion cloud deal with Lambda, a cloud provider backed by Nvidia, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. The Wall Street Journal first reported the agreement.

The Texas Arrangement

The deal centers on a data center in Nueces County, Texas, being built by Hut 8, a company that started as a bitcoin miner and has since expanded into data-center construction. Nvidia signed an agreement with Hut 8 weeks earlier to secure that capacity, according to Bloomberg. Nvidia itself holds the lease on the facility. Lambda will then deploy Nvidia chips inside it and sell the compute to Anthropic to run Claude.

That structure matters. Anthropic is not an investment-grade credit, according to All Weather Finance's reporting on the deal. By holding the lease itself, Nvidia effectively backstops the financing, letting Anthropic lock up capacity it likely couldn't secure through traditional lenders on its own. Nvidia gets a guaranteed customer for its chips either way.

A Spending Spree That Keeps Growing

Earlier in August, Anthropic agreed to spend $45 billion renting capacity from Nscale, another Nvidia-backed provider, for a facility in West Virginia designed to deliver up to 460 megawatts, according to The Business Times and Crypto Briefing. Nscale's build will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chip architecture.

The Business Times also reports Anthropic has signed $50 billion with neocloud provider Fluidstack and $45 billion with Elon Musk's SpaceX. Add a $30 billion Microsoft Azure partnership from November 2025 and a $35 billion financing tranche from June 2026 under Anthropic's "AI XPV Platform," co-led by Apollo and Blackstone and earmarked for infrastructure exceeding one gigawatt, and Anthropic's compute commitments in roughly the past year now run past $250 billion. A separate $10 billion deal with Volta Infra Holdings covers a facility in Norway.

BigGo Finance reports the buying spree followed a supply shortage that constrained Anthropic's growth earlier this year, as demand for Claude outpaced the computing power it had lined up.

Lambda's Own Cash Crunch

Lambda isn't sitting still either. Bloomberg reported on August 25 that Lambda is in talks to raise as much as $3 billion at a valuation that could reach $12 billion or more. The company previously raised more than $1.5 billion in a November 2025 round, and according to BigGo Finance, it recently arranged roughly $1 billion in short-term debt through JPMorgan specifically to fund Nvidia GPU purchases it plans to lease to Microsoft.

The Circular Financing Question

This deal deepens a debate that has followed nearly every recent Nvidia-tied AI infrastructure agreement: how much of this spending is genuine demand versus Nvidia financing its own customer base. Critics, including the Bank for International Settlements according to BigGo Finance, have warned that debt-fueled buildouts where a chipmaker backs the leases and credit of the companies buying its own hardware create financial stability risk if AI revenue growth doesn't keep pace with the borrowing.

If Anthropic's actual subscription and API revenue doesn't scale fast enough to cover $250 billion in multi-year compute obligations, someone is left holding contracts nobody can pay for, and Nvidia's fingerprints are on both sides of the ledger as chip seller and lease holder.

The structure of these deals suggests an alternative view. These are long-term rental contracts with defined power capacity, fixed durations, and real assets like the Nueces County facility going up on the ground. Apollo and Blackstone, in particular, are treating Anthropic's buildout like infrastructure debt rather than speculative equity, which is a different risk profile than a chipmaker simply investing cash back into a customer.

All Weather Finance also reports Nvidia announced a plan in July to extend credit support to emerging cloud providers like Lambda in exchange for a cut of cloud revenue, but has since suspended some transactions under that program. Neither Nvidia nor Anthropic has said publicly why, and none of the parties, including Lambda and Hut 8, responded to requests for comment cited in Bloomberg's reporting.

Anthropic has not filed for an IPO and has not disclosed public revenue figures in any of these reports. Whether $250 billion in locked-in compute obligations lines up with actual Claude revenue growth remains the open question hanging over every one of these deals.