Nvidia holds lease on Hut 8-built Texas data center
Anthropic signed a $35 billion cloud-computing deal with Nvidia-backed Lambda, with Nvidia itself holding the lease on the Texas data center, according to people familiar with the deal. The data center is being developed by bitcoin miner and data-center developer Hut 8 in Nueces County, Texas. Nvidia signed an agreement with Hut 8 a few weeks ago to secure the capacity, the people said.
Lambda will use the facility Hut 8 is developing to plug in chips purchased from Nvidia, which is also Lambda’s investor. It was not clear how much Lambda will pay Nvidia to access the data-center space.
The arrangement illustrates Nvidia’s growing role in helping non-investment-grade firms such as Anthropic gain access to its expensive computing resources, the Journal reported. The deal also helped Lambda, a nascent cloud provider, secure a lucrative contract with Anthropic without needing to procure the data-center space on its own.
Anthropic has been racing to sign cloud-capacity deals after hitting a supply crunch earlier this year that coincided with its products gaining traction, the Journal reported. The AI developer signed a $45 billion deal earlier this month with another Nvidia-backed neocloud, Nscale, to rent Nvidia capacity from its West Virginia site, according to people familiar with that deal. Bloomberg previously reported on Nscale’s deal with Anthropic.
The Texas deal is notable in part because Hut 8 is separately developing data centers for Anthropic that will house Google’s tensor processing units, which compete with Nvidia’s chips. Google has provided financial guarantees to support those projects to help Hut 8 raise debt.
In July, Hut 8 disclosed that a “high-investment-grade company” signed 15-year leases for its entire 700-megawatt Texas campus, but did not name the tenant. Hut 8 said the $20 billion facility would be designed to support Nvidia chips.
In July, Nvidia announced an initiative to offer credit support to so-called neoclouds such as Lambda in exchange for a cut of their cloud revenue. Nvidia recently paused some deals in that program, the Journal reported. It could not be learned whether Lambda is required to provide Nvidia with a share of the revenue it generates at the Texas site.