Anthropic has signed a six-year, $10 billion agreement for cloud compute with Volta, a startup that leases AI capacity, TechCrunch reported on August 4, citing Bloomberg. The compute will run at a data center campus in Tydal, Norway.
The infrastructure underneath that deal was disclosed the same day by the company that owns the site. Bitdeer Technologies Group (Nasdaq: BTDR), a bitcoin miner that has been building an AI infrastructure arm, announced that its subsidiary Tydal Data Center AS had executed a 16-year colocation and services lease with Volta Tydal AS, a Volta subsidiary. Bitdeer's release does not name Anthropic, describing the end customer only as "a leading AI lab." The identification comes from Bloomberg's reporting, not from Bitdeer.
Bitdeer's lease is worth roughly $4.7 billion in contracted revenue over its initial 16-year term, with an eight-year renewal option that would take the total to about $8 billion over 24 years. The tenant can terminate at 10 years with no fee. It is structured as a modified gross lease averaging about $202 per kilowatt per month, with electricity costs reimbursed by the tenant on a pass-through basis, and carries 3 percent annual escalators. Bitdeer expects average annual revenue of $2.4 million per IT megawatt and an NOI margin near 90 percent.
The site will deliver 121 megawatts of critical IT load, supported by an estimated 133 gross megawatts, all of it configured to run Nvidia's Rubin-generation GPUs, with Dell Technologies as the technology provider. It arrives in two equal phases across four data halls: phase one targeted for December 31, 2026 and phase two for March 31, 2027. Bitdeer is building two further halls totaling 47 gross megawatts, out of 180 gross megawatts of total campus capacity, for the second half of 2027. Remaining capital expenditure is about $500 million, roughly $4.0 million per IT megawatt. The campus runs on local hydropower with dual grid connections, at a power usage effectiveness of approximately 1.1.
Volta's obligations to Bitdeer are to be backed by roughly $1.3 billion in letters of credit arranged by affiliates of J.P. Morgan and a second unnamed global financial institution, subject to customary conditions — and Bitdeer can terminate the agreement if Volta misses milestones tied to that backstop. Bitdeer affiliates keep 100 percent ownership of the campus, and no Bitdeer equity or warrants were issued in the transaction.
"Compute is becoming the defining infrastructure asset class of our generation," Volta co-founder and chief executive Ricard Boada said in Bitdeer's release, describing the project as "one of Europe's largest AI factories." Bitdeer chief financial officer Michael G. Potter called the agreement "a key milestone in Bitdeer's evolution as a global AI infrastructure platform." Bitdeer has operated in Norway since 2018. Both Bitdeer and Volta are Nvidia Cloud Partners.
The deal continues a run of compute commitments by Anthropic across several vendors and chip architectures. In July the company signed a 2-gigawatt agreement with AMD alongside the launch of its Instinct MI400 GPUs and Helios racks. Amazon, another Anthropic backer, disclosed a $53.4 billion pre-tax gain on its existing stake in second-quarter results, reported as the retailer topped a $3 trillion market cap on August 3. Third-party credit support for AI data centers has appeared elsewhere in the sector this summer: Nvidia was reported in July to be in talks to guarantee $250 billion for OpenAI's Ohio data center. Anthropic was also among the labs absent from Nvidia's Open Secure AI Alliance when it launched on August 3.
The power side of that build-out is drawing its own capital. Nuclear startup Valar Atomics raised $1 billion led by Sequoia Capital at a $6 billion valuation, weeks after its Ward 250 reactor generated electricity to power an Nvidia Blackwell system.
The same day it signed the Volta deal, Anthropic confirmed it is building an in-house custom silicon team to design its own AI chips.
Source: TechCrunch and Bitdeer Technologies Group
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