According to a September 1 report by The Wall Street Journal, AI company Anthropic has signed a $35 billion (approximately RMB 235.752 billion) cloud computing agreement with cloud service provider Lambda. The uniqueness of this agreement lies in its "subletting" structure— the computing power that Anthropic receives actually comes from data center resources pre-locked by NVIDIA.

NVIDIA's "Second Landlord" Model Comes to Light

The data centers involved are located in Nueces County, Texas, and are being developed by Bitcoin mining company and data center developer Hut 8. Weeks ago, NVIDIA had already signed an agreement with Hut 8, securing the lease of this data center in advance.

In this arrangement, Lambda will use the data center currently under development by Hut 8, deploying chips purchased from NVIDIA, and then provide cloud computing services to Anthropic. As a result, Lambda does not have to bear the initial costs of the data center site, but it is unclear how much fees Lambda must pay to NVIDIA.

This deal is another example of NVIDIA helping Anthropic obtain computing power. Earlier this year, Anthropic faced a bottleneck in computing power supply at the time when its products gained market attention, after which it began aggressively signing cloud computing agreements. Early this month, Anthropic had just signed a $45 billion (approximately RMB 303.109 billion) computing power leasing agreement with another NVIDIA-supported "new cloud" vendor, Nscale.

Double Variables of Competition and Regulation

Notably, Hut 8 is also developing other data centers specifically for Anthropic, and these facilities will be equipped with Google's TPU, competing with NVIDIA chips. Google has provided financial guarantees to help Hut 8 secure funding. In July this year, Hut 8 disclosed that a "high-investment-grade company" had signed a 15-year lease for the entire 700-megawatt Texas campus, but did not reveal the tenant's identity.