Anthropic's Next $10 Billion Wager Depends on Norwegian Hydropower

According to reports, Anthropic will pay Volta Infra Holdings, a startup that even eight months ago existed only in the imaginations of its founders, $10 billion on computing capacity over six years. Volta never named the customer when the deal was announced Tuesday, describing it as a leading AI lab. Bloomberg cited unnamed sources that attributed the deal itself to Anthropic.

Volta's CEO declined to confirm. So did Anthropic. So too did Bitdeer, which controls the data centre in question.

Where the compute actually lives

The location is Bitdeer's Tydal site in Norway, the same one it acquired outright for Bitcoin mining back in 2024. Bitdeer, via its Tydal subsidiary, has inked a 16-year agreement worth $4.7 billion in scheduled payments over the base term and possibly $8 billion should there be an exercised renewal option for up to eight years based on the contract's terms, according to Bitdeer's filings.

On news, shares of Bitdeer surged higher by as much as 23%. Once it begins flowing the company expects that revenue to come with operating margins of nearly 90%, and says it still needs another $500 million worth of further capital to complete its buildout, arriving via two phases across four data halls, the first expected at the end of this year, and the second in March 2027.

This was the real story behind the financing

In fact, Volta's payments to Bitdeer are backstopped by approximately $1.3 billion in standby letters of credit from affiliates of J.P. Morgan and a second unnamed institution. That headline number is less important than that structure. It's a scaled down version of the mechanism whereby Google backs $43.8 billion in lease obligations across its TPU network, credit backing that allows a landlord to fund and construct a data center without requiring the AI lab itself to take on any debt.

As far as I can tell, this is the very first time that sort of deal has appeared from within Nvidia's ecosystem rather than Google's. Volta was started in January by former Brookfield executives and has secured $300 million from investors including Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter at a valuation of $2.4 billion, while separately laying out a global infrastructure program worth around $5 billion alongside asset manager Azora.

Why Norway, specifically

More than 90% of Norway's electricity comes from hydropower, and its chilly climate provides data facilities there a power utilization effectiveness ratio nearing 1.1 to 1.2 versus about 1.58 for the widespread U.S. facility. On a site rated at 121 megawatt, that gap is the difference between losing tens of megawatts to cooling overhead versus actually running chips.

The hardware itself is actually Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin platform, delivered through Dell, which is specifically designed for the high-end liquid cooling that a site of this sort can handle better than most.

This is one item in a more extensive list. This year Anthropic alone has signed compute agreements with SpaceX, AMD, and Akamai, and is reportedly in talks for capacity with Meta as well; it also secured a $15 billion joint commitment from Nvidia and Microsoft to help fund the company back in November, alongside its purchase of $30 billion worth of Azure.

Regardless of whether Anthropic ever confirms the Volta deal directly, the trend is universal: AI labs are running out of chips to rent and beginning to finance their own power plants.

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