Behind Anthropic's $35 Billion Cloud Deal, Nvidia Is the Real Landlord

Anthropic's $35 billion deal with cloud service provider Lambda has a hidden winner: Nvidia. The chipmaker not only sells chips to Lambda and holds an investment in the company, but has also secured the data center lease that will house the computing power, quietly becoming the "invisible landlord" in the largest cloud service transaction in AI history and benefiting across multiple links of the supply chain.

Anthropic's $35 billion cloud service deal is ostensibly signed with cloud provider Lambda, but the party actually holding the data center lease and playing the role of "landlord" is Nvidia.

According to a Wall Street Journal report on Tuesday, Anthropic signed a $35 billion cloud service agreement with Lambda, a cloud provider backed by Nvidia. However, the data center that will house the computing power is being built by Hut 8 in Nueces County, Texas, and Nvidia signed a separate agreement with Hut 8 weeks ago to lock in capacity, effectively holding the lease on the data center.

Under this structure, Lambda's role is more like an intermediary in the computing power supply chain—it installs chips purchased from Nvidia into space leased by Nvidia, then delivers cloud services to Anthropic. Nvidia is both Lambda's chip supplier and an investor, and now also holds the data center lease, benefiting at multiple levels from this deal.

The $35 billion scale once again confirms the massive demand for underlying computing power from leading large model companies, and provides new evidence for the sustainability of Nvidia's GPU demand.

$35 Billion Deal: Nvidia Is the "Landlord"

The $35 billion cloud service agreement between Anthropic and Lambda is one of the largest cloud service deals in AI to date.

The deal is unique in its multi-layered structure: Anthropic is the end customer of cloud services, Lambda is the cloud provider signing the contract, and the data center housing the computing power is actually leased by Nvidia.

The data center is being built by Hut 8 in Nueces County, Texas, and Nvidia signed its own agreement with Hut 8 weeks ago to lock in capacity in advance. This means that when Lambda deploys chips purchased from Nvidia into this space, its "landlord" is Nvidia.

Lambda: The Middle Layer Between Computing Supply and Demand

Lambda is a cloud service provider focused on GPU cloud computing and backed by Nvidia investment. In this deal, it plays the role of connecting chip supply with the computing needs of model companies: purchasing GPUs from Nvidia, installing them in data center space leased by Nvidia, and delivering them to Anthropic in the form of cloud services.

Lambda is reportedly in talks for a pre-IPO financing of up to $3 billion, with a valuation possibly exceeding $12 billion. Lambda raised over $1.5 billion in a funding round in November. The company also reached an agreement with Microsoft last year to deploy AI infrastructure powered by tens of thousands of Nvidia processors.

For Nvidia, this deal means multi-level participation—it sells chips to Lambda, shares in its growth as an investor, and controls the critical data center link through the lease. Through this order, Nvidia is able to further expand its influence in the AI computing supply chain beyond chip supply.

Another Order in the Computing Arms Race

The $35 billion scale is a continuation of Anthropic's computing expansion strategy. To support the sharply rising demand for model training and inference, Anthropic has recently signed multiple large-scale computing agreements, including a nearly $45 billion partnership with SpaceX, an $1.8 billion agreement with Akamai, and purchases of chips and cloud services from Google. This Lambda order is another move in its computing arms race with rivals such as OpenAI and Google.

The signal of this deal is that although Anthropic is already advancing its own chip development and diversifying suppliers, its computing expansion still requires large-scale purchases of Nvidia GPUs in the short to medium term. And in this order, Nvidia simultaneously acts as chip supplier, investor in the cloud provider, and data center lessee, with involvement far deeper than simple hardware sales.