Anthropic’s $35 billion deal runs on a campus Nvidia leased in July

Anthropic has signed a $35 billion cloud-computing deal with Lambda, an Nvidia-backed provider, for a Texas data center. Nvidia already holds the lease on that campus, which Hut 8 is building in Nueces County.

Some of the capacity will sit at Hut 8’s Beacon Point campus. Reuters put the Anthropic portion at about 350 megawatts, which is about half of the 704 megawatts Hut 8 has leased there.

Hut 8 has never named the tenant on 704 megawatts

Hut 8 is building out the site and has named its tenant only as a high-investment-grade counterparty. Lambda will install the chips, and Anthropic is the buyer.

Nvidia signed leases worth up to $50 billion for the campus, the Financial Times reported on July 28, citing five people familiar with the deal. That was five weeks before the Anthropic agreement surfaced.

The Wall Street Journal, which first broke the Lambda deal, said Nvidia would supply the chips and hold the lease, citing people familiar with it.

“Nvidia is working with ecosystem partners to accelerate the deployment of efficient AI infrastructure through the DSX AI factory architecture,” a spokesperson said, without confirming or denying the report.

Beacon Point is 525 acres with access to up to 1 gigawatt of power and a grid connection already built.

Getting hundreds of megawatts connected to the grid from scratch takes years. Miners already run large sites on cheap power and completed interconnections.

HUT popped on the news before pulling back, closing down 0.98% at $78.64 on Monday, August 31, and slipping further to close at $77.57 on Tuesday, September 1.

Riot withheld a tenant name on 191 megawatts too

On May 6, Hut 8 announced the first Beacon Point lease, a 15-year, 352 megawatt agreement with a base-term value of $9.8 billion. If all renewal options are exercised, that figure could rise to $25.1 billion, the company said.

That commitment brought the miner’s total contracted AI capacity to 597 megawatts and ~$16.8 billion in total base-term value.

A second 352-megawatt lease was signed July 20, doubling the same tenant’s campus capacity to 704 megawatts. It lifted the campus base-term value to $19.6 billion, or as much as $50.2 billion if renewals are exercised.

It’s a triple-net lease, so the tenant pays tax, insurance, and maintenance on top of the rent.

In August, Riot announced a 20-year, 191-megawatt lease at its site in Rockdale, Texas. The base term is worth $9.1 billion, and two five-year extensions would lift it to $16.1 billion.

Riot initially refused to identify the tenant, saying it was “one of the world’s leading frontier AI labs,” before the link was made to Anthropic, Cryptopolitan reported.

Riot expects to have as much as 96 megawatts available at Rockdale by December 2027 and fully deployed by June 2028.