Behind Anthropic's $35 billion cloud deal, the real landlord is Nvidia.

The $35 billion cloud service deal signed by Anthropic is ostensibly with cloud service provider Lambda, but in reality, it is Nvidia that holds the data center leases and acts as the "landlord."

According to a Wall Street Journal report on Tuesday, Anthropic signed a $35 billion cloud services agreement with Lambda, a cloud service provider backed by Nvidia. However, the data center hosting the computing power was built by Hut 8 in Nuces County, Texas, and Nvidia had already signed a separate contract with Hut 8 weeks ago to lock in the capacity, effectively holding a lease for the data center.

In this structure, Lambda acts more like an intermediary in the computing power supply chain—it packs chips purchased from Nvidia into spaces leased by Nvidia and then delivers cloud services to Anthropic. Nvidia is Lambda's chip supplier, its investor, and now also holds data center leases, thus benefiting from multiple layers of this deal.

The $35 billion figure once again demonstrates the enormous demand for underlying computing power from leading large-scale companies, and also provides a new explanation for the continued demand for Nvidia GPUs.

Nvidia is the "landlord" in this $35 billion deal.

Anthropic's $35 billion cloud services deal with Lambda is one of the largest cloud services deals in the AI field to date.

What makes this deal unique is its multi-layered structure: Anthropic is the end customer of the cloud service, Lambda is the cloud service provider that contracts with external parties, and the data center that carries the computing power is actually leased by Nvidia.

The data center was built by Hut 8 in Nuces County, Texas. Nvidia had signed its own agreement with Hut 8 several weeks ago to secure capacity in advance. This means that when Lambda deployed the chips it purchased from Nvidia into this space, Nvidia was the "landlord."

Lambda: The middle layer between computing power supply and demand

Lambda is a cloud service provider specializing in GPU cloud computing and has received investment from Nvidia. In this transaction, it acts as a bridge between chip suppliers and the computing power needs of the model company: purchasing GPUs from Nvidia, installing them in Nvidia-leased data center space, and then delivering them to Anthropic as cloud services.

Lambda is reportedly in talks for a pre-IPO funding round of up to $3 billion, potentially valuing the company at over $12 billion. Lambda raised more than $1.5 billion in a funding round in November . Last year, the company also reached an agreement with Microsoft to deploy artificial intelligence infrastructure powered by tens of thousands of Nvidia processors.

For Nvidia, this deal represents a multi-layered involvement—it sells chips to Lambda, shares in its growth as an investor, and controls the crucial data center segment through leases. This order allows Nvidia to further expand its influence in the AI computing power supply chain beyond simply supplying chips.

Another order in the computing power arms race

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

The significance of this deal lies in the fact that although Anthropic is advancing its self-developed chips and expanding its diversified supplier base, its computing power expansion will still require large-scale procurement of Nvidia GPUs in the short to medium term. Nvidia's involvement in this order extends far beyond simple hardware sales; it acts as a chip supplier, cloud service provider investor, and data center lessee.

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