Anthropic signs $35 billion compute deal with Nvidia-backed Lambda for a Texas data center

Anthropic signed a $35 billion cloud computing deal with Lambda, a cloud provider backed by Nvidia, to secure GPU capacity at a new data center in Nueces County, Texas. The agreement, signed August 31, covers roughly 350 megawatts of computing capacity that Anthropic will use for AI training and inference — the two most compute-hungry parts of running and improving a model like Claude.

The deal structure is more layered than a typical cloud contract: Hut 8, a company that pivoted from cryptocurrency mining into AI data center infrastructure, is developing the physical site; Nvidia holds the lease and supplies the chips; Lambda provides the compute service on top; and Anthropic is the end customer paying for capacity. It follows a separate $45 billion commitment Anthropic made days earlier for compute from an Nscale data center campus in West Virginia — together, tens of billions of dollars in compute commitments signed within the same week.

Deals like this are a useful way to gauge how seriously a lab is scaling, independent of any single model release — this is Anthropic locking in the raw compute it expects to need for years of future training runs, not a one-off purchase. It's also a reminder of just how much of the AI industry's spending now flows through Nvidia in one form or another, even in deals where Nvidia isn't the company you're technically paying.