NVIDIA Takes on Data Center Lease in Anthropic's $35 Billion Lambda Deal
Anthropic has agreed to pay $35 billion over six years to purchase roughly 350MW of compute capacity from Lambda, an AI cloud provider. The deal was reported by the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and AFP based on interviews with people familiar with the matter.
The headline number is significant. The structural arrangement beneath it is more interesting.
Four Companies, Four Layers
The deal does not involve a direct bilateral contract between Anthropic and a data center operator. Instead, it runs through a four-layer stack:
| Company | Role |
|---|---|
| Hut 8 | Builds and owns Beacon Point (Nueces County, Texas). Signs two 352MW, 15-year leases at $9.8B each. |
| NVIDIA | Supplies GPUs. Also signs the underlying data center lease, per WSJ reporting. |
| Lambda | Procures GPU infrastructure, operates cloud capacity. NVIDIA invested $480M in Lambda in February 2025. |
| Anthropic | End buyer. Six years of compute for $35B, used for Claude training and inference. |
Under this structure, NVIDIA functions as both chip vendor and facility tenant — a combination of roles that extends its financial exposure well beyond completing a hardware transaction.
What Hut 8 Actually Disclosed
Hut 8 announced two separate 352MW phases at Beacon Point: Phase 1 in May 2026, Phase 2 in July 2026. Each carries a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease. Total contracted IT capacity: 704MW, $19.6B in base lease value. In both disclosures, Hut 8 describes the tenant only as a “highly investment-grade company,” without naming NVIDIA.
The 350MW Anthropic is reportedly buying corresponds to roughly one of those two phases. Beacon Point’s total power receiving capacity is 1,000MW, of which only 704MW has been contracted for IT equipment. The numbers do not scale directly.
The NVIDIA Angle
NVIDIA’s presence as a facility tenant is a departure from its core model of selling semiconductors to cloud providers and enterprises. By signing the Hut 8 lease — and simultaneously supplying the GPUs that fill the facility — NVIDIA is bearing credit exposure on both the real estate and the hardware, with Lambda as the intermediate cloud operator and Anthropic as the anchor demand.
The deal follows NVIDIA’s $480M investment in Lambda’s funding round in February 2025, which already gave the chip maker equity exposure to the cloud layer. The Beacon Point lease reportedly layers facility exposure on top.
How much risk NVIDIA actually carries depends on terms not yet public: the size of NVIDIA’s specific lease, Lambda’s GPU purchase obligations, and Anthropic’s payment schedule. Without those figures, it is not possible to determine where credit default risk would land in a scenario where Anthropic’s demand declined.
Scale Context
At $35B over six years, Anthropic’s Lambda commitment averages roughly $5.8B per year on compute alone. The company’s current annualized revenue run rate has not been publicly disclosed at this scale. The deal represents a large forward bet on continued demand for frontier model training and inference at a time when inference efficiency is improving and model release cycles are compressing.
The Beacon Point facility is expected to deliver first power in Q1 2027, with data hall delivery following. Anthropic’s obligation does not begin until capacity is operational.