Anthropic has agreed to spend $10 billion on computing power from Volta, a cloud startup so new that most of the industry has never heard of it, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal, reported by Bloomberg, would put a data center in Norway, with one site under consideration at a facility owned by bitcoin miner Bitdeer.
The contract is the latest sign that the world’s leading AI labs are willing to bet on unknown infrastructure companies to secure the computing they need. Anthropic already buys capacity from the major clouds — Amazon and Google are both investors — and from specialists like CoreWeave and Nebius. The Volta deal adds another lane to that list.
Norway’s appeal is electricity. The country generates nearly all its power from hydroelectric plants, and its cool climate cuts the cost of cooling data centers. Power has become the scarce input in AI: data centers now compete with entire cities for electricity, and grid constraints have delayed projects across the United States and Europe. The Nordic countries, with abundant hydro and wind, have become a magnet for compute builders.
The Bitdeer connection fits the pattern. The Nasdaq-listed bitcoin miner has been converting some of its facilities into AI data centers, and its Norwegian site is among the locations under consideration for Volta’s project, according to people familiar with the matter. Miners, who built data centers in cheap-power regions for years, are finding a second life hosting AI workloads.
Volta joins a wave of new clouds that began with CoreWeave. That company started as a cryptocurrency miner, accumulated a stash of Nvidia GPUs, and transformed itself into one of the largest providers of AI computing, with contracts worth tens of billions of dollars and a stock market listing. Nebius, spun out of the Russian internet company Yandex, followed a similar path in Europe. The lesson: in a market where demand for GPUs outstrips supply, a startup with access to chips and power can enter the top tier quickly.
Anthropic’s move reflects a simple risk calculation, analysts said. A lab that depends on a single cloud provider for its most important input is exposed to that provider’s pricing, outages and strategic interests. The major clouds are also the backers of Anthropic’s competitors — and in some cases competitors themselves. Spreading orders across providers gives Anthropic negotiating power and insurance at once.
The company has been expanding through Amazon Web Services in India even as it signs the Volta deal, a sign that it wants both scale and choice. Anthropic has said its compute costs will run into the tens of billions of dollars as it trains larger models, and its chief executive has argued that the industry will need hundreds of billions in computing investment in the next few years.
The Volta contract is one of the largest compute commitments made public this year, and it will strain even Anthropic’s balance sheet. The company, valued at well over $100 billion in its most recent funding round, has the capital to make the payments, but the deal shows how much of its future spending is now committed to infrastructure rather than research.
The deal also shows where the AI build-out is heading: toward regions with power to spare. Norway, Iceland and other Nordic countries have become favored locations, and governments across Europe are competing to attract data centers with tax breaks and fast permitting. The electricity constraint, more than chip supply, is shaping where the industry builds.
The scale of the broader build-out is staggering. OpenAI’s Stargate project with Oracle and SoftBank has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to new data centers, and the major clouds are spending more than $100 billion a year each on capital projects. Against that backdrop, a $10 billion contract with a new entrant is notable less for its size than for what it says about the structure of the market: even the biggest labs are shopping around.
Betting on a startup has costs. New clouds lack the operational track record of the incumbents, and delays are common as they build out facilities and wait for chips. If Volta falls behind, Anthropic’s training schedule suffers — the one thing a lab cannot afford. Analysts said the deal is a hedge, not a bet-the-company move: the contract is tied to capacity Volta must build, and Anthropic retains flexibility with its other providers.
For Volta, the contract is a ticket into the industry’s top tier. For Anthropic, it is another step away from dependence on the giants that also back its rivals. And for the rest of the industry, it is evidence that in AI, the companies that own the chips — or the electricity to run them — hold the strongest hand.
