Anthropic signs $35 billion cloud deal with Nvidia-backed Lambda for Texas data center capacity

Anthropic has agreed to a $35 billion cloud computing deal with Lambda, a cloud provider backed by Nvidia, to secure access to artificial intelligence computing capacity at a data center under development in Nueces County, Texas, according to people familiar with the matter cited in reporting first published by Bloomberg on August 31, 2026.

The arrangement was described by sources rather than confirmed in an on-the-record joint statement. A representative for Anthropic declined to comment when approached by reporters, and Nvidia, Lambda and the data center's developer, Hut 8, did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to the reporting.

How the deal is structured

The agreement ties together several companies. Hut 8 is developing the data center campus, known as Beacon Point, on roughly 1 gigawatt of secured utility capacity in Nueces County. Nvidia holds two 15-year leases on the campus covering about 704 megawatts of contracted capacity split across two phases of roughly 352 megawatts each, a lease arrangement first reported by the Wall Street Journal with a base value of about $19.6 billion that could grow toward $50 billion over its full term with renewals.

Anthropic's new $35 billion deal with Lambda draws on roughly 350 megawatts of that capacity, according to the reporting -- effectively one phase of the Beacon Point site. Under the structure, Lambda installs Nvidia chips at the facility and sells the resulting computing capacity to Anthropic, while Nvidia itself sits above the arrangement as both chip supplier and the entity that leased the underlying data center space from Hut 8. Initial energization of the campus is expected in the first quarter of 2027.

Lambda, for its part, is reportedly in the process of raising up to $3 billion in new funding at a valuation of $12 billion or higher, after previously raising $1.5 billion in a funding round last November.

A rapid run of mega deals

The Lambda agreement is Anthropic's second major cloud deal within days. On August 26, 2026, Bloomberg and CNBC reported that Anthropic had struck a roughly $45 billion, six-year deal with Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure company, to rent about 460 megawatts of capacity from a West Virginia data center expected to use Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips and come online by the end of 2027.

Those two deals sit alongside a broader run of infrastructure commitments Anthropic has made in 2026: a roughly $50 billion partnership with Fluidstack covering data centers in Texas and New York, a roughly $45 billion computing arrangement with Elon Musk's SpaceX disclosed in May, and a roughly $10 billion, six-year compute deal with Volta Infra Holdings, a cloud startup that was only founded months earlier. Taken together, the four previously reported deals alone add up to more than $150 billion in compute commitments, a figure that grows further once the new Lambda agreement is included.

The buildout follows a period earlier in the year when Anthropic faced a compute supply shortage as demand for its Claude models, including its Claude Code coding tool, outpaced the capacity it had secured. The company has since been signing capacity deals with a widening circle of cloud and infrastructure providers, several of them, like Lambda and Nscale, themselves backed by Nvidia investment.

Revenue growth behind the spending

The infrastructure spree comes as Anthropic's own financial results have surged. CNBC reported on August 15, 2026, citing documents viewed by Bloomberg News, that Anthropic's preliminary revenue for the second quarter of 2026 topped $11.5 billion, up from about $787 million in the same quarter a year earlier -- growth of more than fourteen times. The company also reported positive adjusted operating income for the quarter, according to the same reporting. The figures were described as preliminary and could still change.

Anthropic is preparing for a stock market listing, having submitted confidential IPO paperwork in June 2026, according to reporting on the company's plans. The compute commitments are widely seen by industry observers as necessary groundwork for sustaining the growth Anthropic is showing investors ahead of that listing.

Questions about circular financing

The structure of the Lambda deal, in which Nvidia supplies the chips, holds an equity stake in the cloud provider buying those chips, and separately leases the data center where they will run, has revived a debate in the AI industry over so-called circular financing: arrangements in which a chipmaker's investments and lease commitments effectively help fund the very customers that then purchase its hardware.

Mizuho chip analyst Jordan Klein described the financing model underpinning these deals as concerning, characterizing it as a structure in which Nvidia GPUs are effectively used as collateral and rented back into the AI supply chain, with lease payments from tenants like Lambda and Anthropic ultimately used to repay the debt raised to build the data centers -- a model he said functions much like Nvidia pre-funding purchases of its own products.

Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya has separately pointed to a related tension: many of Nvidia's investments are designed to support frontier AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic, even as both companies are simultaneously developing their own custom chips that could eventually reduce their reliance on Nvidia hardware.

Nvidia's finance chief, Colette Kress, has acknowledged the criticism directly, saying the company recognizes the scale of its support for AI labs and knows some will call it circular financing. Her defense rests on the argument that Nvidia's computing platform is fungible and durable and can be redeployed to support other customers even if a particular lab's demand changes, rather than being tied permanently to any single counterparty. Nvidia has disclosed it had closed a recent quarter with $279 billion in supply obligations and $108.5 billion in guarantee obligations tied to AI cloud partners, and Kress has said the company has invested nearly $50 billion across frontier AI labs.

The case for genuine demand

Anthropic's defenders of the spending point to a different set of numbers: the company's revenue climbing from roughly $787 million to more than $11.5 billion in a single year is an independently reported, verifiable growth rate that predates and is separate from any of the Nvidia-linked financing structures now drawing scrutiny. By this reading, Anthropic's compute needs are being driven by real, paying customer demand for Claude and related products such as Claude Code, and the string of infrastructure deals -- however entangled with Nvidia's own balance sheet -- reflects a company scrambling to keep pace with genuine usage rather than financial engineering designed to manufacture the appearance of demand.

Skeptics counter that rapid revenue growth and circular financing concerns are not mutually exclusive: even a company with real underlying demand can end up locked into deals whose true economics are harder to assess when the counterparty supplying the chips is also, in effect, backing the buyer and the landlord. Whether the compute Anthropic is contracting for ultimately gets used at the scale implied by these multibillion-dollar commitments will not be fully clear until the facilities involved, including the Nueces County campus, are built out and running.

What happens next

None of the companies involved -- Anthropic, Nvidia, Lambda or Hut 8 -- has issued an on-the-record confirmation of the deal's exact terms, and the reporting to date rests on people described as familiar with private discussions. Initial capacity at the Beacon Point campus is not expected to come online until the first quarter of 2027, meaning the practical impact of the Lambda agreement on Anthropic's available compute will not be visible for several months.

For now, the deal adds to a picture of an AI industry in which chipmaker, cloud provider, landlord and end customer are increasingly the same small set of interconnected companies -- a structure that has so far coincided with, but not conclusively explained, some of the fastest revenue growth reported anywhere in the technology sector.