Anthropic signs a $10bn compute deal with a week-old cloud startup

Anthropic has signed a $10 billion, six-year compute deal with Volta, a cloud startup that only just launched, according to Bloomberg. The agreement is Volta's marquee contract and adds another supplier to Anthropic's already crowded list. Anthropic now buys capacity almost everywhere it can. Its biggest backer, Amazon, has put up to $25 billion into the company and supplies much of its compute. The company has also struck deals with Google and Broadcom, leaned heavily on Google's TPUs, and secured agreements with AMD, CoreWeave, Akamai, and SpaceX. Anthropic has also been in talks with Meta over a compute agreement of the same size. Volta was founded this year, valued at $2.4 billion, and only recently emerged from stealth. The startup is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, Nvidia, and Michael Dell. It plans to run Anthropic's capacity partly through the bitcoin miner Bitdeer, starting at a site in Norway. For Volta, the deal provides credibility and cash flows to raise and build against. For Anthropic, spreading compute across many suppliers acts as insurance against reliance on any single provider. Anthropic's compute commitments now run to tens of billions of dollars. The spending tracks revenue growth as Claude has won enterprise customers. Committing $10 billion to a days-old company carries risk, as Volta still has to build and deliver at a scale established clouds find hard.