Why Anthropic just signed a $10bn deal with a 6-month-old company

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, has signed a deal worth roughly $10 billion to secure computing power it needs to keep running and improving its AI models. What's notable isn't just the size of the deal, it's who Anthropic signed it with: a company called Volta that has existed for only about six months.

Bloomberg reported on 4 August 2026 that Anthropic signed a six-year, roughly $10 billion contract with Volta Infra Holdings. Volta confirmed a $10 billion deal with an unnamed major AI lab on the same day, though Anthropic declined to comment.

The deal covers 121 megawatts of processing power from Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, a type of hardware used to train and run AI models. The capacity sits at a site in Norway run by a company called Bitdeer, and will arrive in two stages, targeting the end of December 2026 and the end of March 2027.

Underneath that deal is another one: Bitdeer's Norway unit signed a 16-year lease with a Volta subsidiary worth about $4.7 billion in scheduled payments, rising to roughly $8 billion over 24 years if renewed. Banking group JPMorgan is backing about $1.3 billion in guarantees that secure the arrangement.

Volta itself is new. It raised $300 million at a $2.4 billion valuation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, chipmaker Nvidia, and the Michael Dell family office. It also runs a $5 billion pool to help customers like Anthropic pay for chips.

This Volta deal is part of a much bigger push. In about 60 days, Anthropic has arranged roughly $71 billion in chip-lease financing, according to Yahoo Finance. Under this structure, separate financial vehicles buy chips, in this case Google's TPUs, and lease them to Anthropic, keeping the hardware and the debt off Anthropic's own books. Chipmaker Broadcom is backstopping part of that financing. Blackstone is reportedly in talks on another package, and a separate $9.1 billion deal with Riot Platforms sent Riot's shares up 25%. More detail is in The Decoder's report.

Deals of this scale used to be reserved for Amazon, Microsoft or Google. Anthropic is now doing them with newer, smaller players because demand for Claude is outpacing the computing power it already has.

The notes don't say whether this changes Claude's price or availability for everyday users. What it does show is how much computing power AI companies now need just to keep up with demand, and how far they're willing to go to get it, including turning to companies that barely existed a year ago.

Critics have flagged one risk worth knowing about: Nvidia is both an investor in Volta and the company supplying the chips Volta leases out. That overlap between supplier and financier could make losses worse across the whole chain if demand for AI ever falls short of expectations.

Anthropic has not commented publicly on the Volta deal. The first phase of computing capacity is due by 31 December 2026, with the second phase due by 31 March 2027. Talks on further financing, including with Blackstone, are reportedly ongoing.