Rohan Paul

TechCrunch

The Next Web

Anthropic has signed a $10 billion, six-year compute deal with Volta Infra Holdings, a cloud startup founded earlier in 2026 that was barely weeks old when the contract was announced. The deal adds Volta to Anthropic’s already long list of compute suppliers, which includes Amazon, Google, AMD, CoreWeave, Akamai, and SpaceX.
Volta was founded by former Brookfield infrastructure executives and has raised $300 million in venture funding at a $2.4 billion valuation, with another $5 billion in financing arranged through a program with Azora. Backers include a16z, Altimeter, Nvidia, and Michael Dell’s family office.
The company’s model is unusual. Volta owns almost none of the hardware itself. Its first data center is a 133MW site in Norway operated with Bitdeer, a bitcoin miner that leased out 121MW at the site under a 16-year contract worth roughly $4.7 billion. Nvidia supplies the chips, Dell assembles the systems, and Volta sits in the middle holding the financing, the contracts, and the customer relationship. The site will run on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chip architecture, and Volta is part of Nvidia’s Cloud Partner program.
CEO Ricard Boada described the arrangement as worth roughly $1.7 billion a year to Volta. The company has also secured 1 gigawatt of power capacity overall, with plans for several gigawatts by 2030.
The structure raises an obvious question: a $2.4 billion company has promised $10 billion of service on machines it leases from a bitcoin miner. Anthropic is essentially buying guaranteed schedule rather than owning servers, and that speed comes with counterparty risk that no hyperscaler contract ever carried.
For Anthropic, the deal fits a deliberate strategy of spreading compute across many suppliers to avoid dependence on any single provider and gain pricing leverage. Its total compute commitments now run into the tens of billions, backed by rapidly growing enterprise revenue.
The broader context is worth noting. A contract this size used to go to Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, because only they had the land, power, and balance sheets to support frontier AI training. That dynamic held while capital was the scarce input. Now power is the bottleneck, and the hyperscalers can’t energize a new site any faster than a well-connected newcomer can. That’s the gap Volta is trying to fill.

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Anthropic has signed a $10bn, six-year compute deal with Volta Infra Holdings, a newly founded cloud startup backed by Nvidia, Dell, and Andreessen Horowitz. Volta's model is essentially financial engineering: Nvidia supplies chips, Dell assembles systems, and Bitdeer (a bitcoin miner turned data center operator) provides a 133MW facility in Norway. Volta sits in the middle holding contracts and financing. The deal expands Anthropic's already diverse compute supplier network — which includes Amazon, Google, AMD, CoreWeave, and SpaceX — as part of a strategy to avoid single-provider dependence and lock in power capacity at scale. The arrangement highlights that power availability, not capital, has become the primary bottleneck in AI infrastructure, enabling a weeks-old startup to land a deal of this magnitude over established hyperscalers.

Anthropic signs $10bn compute deal with Volta, a startup backed by Nvidia and Dell