Anthropic reportedly signs $10 billion computing deal with Volta

In short: Anthropic has reportedly agreed to a $10 billion, six-year deal for computing power from AI cloud startup Volta.

What happened

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, has signed a major agreement with Volta, according to reporting from Bloomberg and covered by TechCrunch. The deal is reportedly worth $10 billion and runs for six years.

Volta is a newer company that was founded earlier this year. Under the reported agreement, Volta would provide “cloud compute”, meaning rented computer power delivered over the internet (like paying for electricity from a utility, but for processing and storage). This kind of capacity is used to train AI models and to run them for everyday users.

The deal also involves Bitdeer, a crypto-mining company, which will help develop a data center for the project. A data center is a large building filled with computers that run online services (think of it as a warehouse for the internet’s machines). The facility is expected to be located in Norway and is described as having 133 megawatts of capacity.

The computers in that facility are expected to use Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems, which are advanced AI chips designed to handle heavy AI workloads. Volta is also part of Nvidia’s Cloud Partner program, a group of cloud providers that build data centers around Nvidia graphics processors (GPUs, chips that are especially good at the kind of math AI needs).

Why it matters

AI companies are competing for enough computing power to build and operate their systems. If this deal goes through, it could help Anthropic secure a steady supply, which can affect how reliable, fast, and available AI services like Claude are.

Source: TechCrunch AI