SILICON VALLEY — Anthropic, the developer of the AI model Claude, has secured data center capacity from a cloud company backed by Nvidia. Nvidia is pouring vast amounts of cash into cloud firms to maintain its dominance in graphics processing units in the AI market.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the 31st of last month, citing sources, that Anthropic had signed a cloud computing contract worth $35 billion (about 47.9 trillion won) with Lambda, an AI cloud company backed by Nvidia. Anthropic will use AI computing capacity at a data center in New Ayers County, Texas, to be operated by Lambda, over an extended period.
The data center is being built by infrastructure developer Hut 8, and Nvidia has signed a contract with Hut 8 to secure leasing rights to the facility's capacity. Lambda will install Nvidia GPUs at the site and supply Anthropic with the cloud computing needed to train and run AI models. The facility will have a capacity of up to 700 megawatts.
Under the arrangement, Hut 8 builds the data center, Nvidia provides the leasing rights and the GPUs, Lambda operates the GPU cloud, and Anthropic buys the computing capacity the cloud produces.
The structure is seen as a way to smooth the financing required to build large data centers. Rather than having Anthropic, whose credit rating is not public, sign a long-term infrastructure contract worth tens of billions of dollars on its own, Nvidia holds the leasing rights, lowering the credit risk for Hut 8 and financial institutions.
Anthropic, which is preparing to go public at the end of the year, relies heavily on Nvidia to develop its AI models. In early August, Anthropic signed a $45 billion contract with Nscale, another cloud company backed by Nvidia, agreeing to lease Nvidia computing capacity in West Virginia.
Nvidia is also supporting OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. On the 17th of last month, OpenAI signed a contract with SB Energy and Nvidia to secure 8 gigawatts of infrastructure at the Fortspike data center campus in Pike County, Ohio.
