Nvidia Holds the Lease in Anthropic's $35B Lambda Cloud Deal, Raising Circular-Financing Questions

Anthropic signed a $35 billion cloud-computing agreement with Lambda, a cloud provider backed by Nvidia, according to a source familiar with the matter cited by Reuters. The deal is meant to bring additional Nvidia capacity online for Claude, Anthropic's family of AI models. That much is straightforward. The structure underneath it is not.

As first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia holds the lease on the Texas data center at the center of the arrangement. The facility, located in Nueces County, is being developed by Hut 8, a former bitcoin miner that has repositioned itself as a data center operator. According to reporting from Bloomberg and Reuters, Nvidia reached its own agreement with Hut 8 to lock in capacity at the site; Lambda then agreed to deploy Nvidia chips there and supply the resulting compute to Anthropic.

That's a four-party stack: Hut 8 builds and operates the building, Nvidia holds the lease and supplies the chips, Lambda sits in the middle as the nominal cloud provider, and Anthropic is the end customer committing the dollars. The Wall Street Journal noted that the financial terms between Lambda and Nvidia for access to the facility were not disclosed.

The architecture matters because it puts Nvidia in a role well beyond its traditional one. The company invested in Lambda, reportedly holds the underlying real estate lease, and supplies the GPUs that Lambda will rack in that building to serve Anthropic's workloads. A Mizuho chip analyst described the broader pattern to BigGo Finance as effectively Nvidia pre-funding purchases of its own products, using GPUs as collateral and relying on customer lease payments to repay loans. The Bank for International Settlements flagged similar circular-financing patterns as a financial stability concern in its 2026 annual economic report.

Lambda closed a $926 million senior secured term loan in late August to fund GPU infrastructure for the project, and is reportedly in talks to raise up to $3 billion more at a valuation that could reach $12 billion, according to Bloomberg.

For Anthropic, the Lambda deal is one piece of a much larger compute scramble. The company hit a supply crunch earlier this year as Claude usage climbed faster than its contracted capacity could absorb. Since then, according to reporting from Bloomberg and Reuters, it has pursued agreements with multiple neocloud providers, including a $45 billion deal with Nscale for West Virginia capacity and a separate arrangement with Fluidstack. Hut 8 is also developing additional Texas sites for Anthropic that will run on Google's Tensor Processing Units rather than Nvidia hardware, with Google providing financial guarantees to help Hut 8 secure debt financing.

That TPU track is worth watching. It's the only piece of Anthropic's infrastructure push that doesn't route through Nvidia's ecosystem. Everything else in this week's disclosures does.

The Crusoe-Jane Street deal reported September 3 by Bloomberg adds a different wrinkle to the same picture. Jane Street, a proprietary trading firm, signed a five-year, roughly $13 billion contract with Crusoe for GPU clusters and supporting infrastructure. As The Next Web noted, that brings Jane Street's total committed AI compute across Crusoe and CoreWeave to around $19 billion. A trading firm, not an AI lab, is now one of the largest contracted buyers of GPU cloud capacity in the market.

Neither Crusoe nor Jane Street confirmed the figures publicly. Both the Crusoe and Anthropic deal values come from people familiar with the arrangements rather than from public contract disclosures, so the numbers should be read as reported transaction values, not audited contract economics.

What both deals confirm is that the constraint on AI infrastructure isn't demand from AI companies anymore. It's power, land, capital structure, and the willingness of chip suppliers to take on roles that chip suppliers don't normally take on.

Sources cited:
- Reuters (via Yahoo Finance) (https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/crusoe-signs-13-billion-ai-195326470.html)
- Bloomberg (Anthropic-Lambda) (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-31/anthropic-seals-35-billion-cloud-deal-with-nvidia-backed-lambda)
- Bloomberg (Crusoe-Jane Street) (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-03/crusoe-signs-roughly-13-billion-ai-cloud-deal-with-jane-street)
- The Next Web (https://thenextweb.com/news/crusoe-jane-street-13-billion-ai-cloud-deal)
- Quartz (Reuters/WSJ) (https://qz.com/anthropic-lambda-nvidia-cloud-deal-35-billion-090126)
- BigGo Finance (https://finance.biggo.com/news/7bb57d1c-6ac6-4541-8866-fa6b4adde3e0)
- Yahoo Finance / Bloomberg (https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/anthropic-seals-35-billion-cloud-235404995.html)