Anthropic A large order of tens of billions of computing power was placed on an unknown recruit Volta: What it bought was a timetable, and the bet was that the opponent would not be thunderous. Anthropic handed over a computing service agreement worth 10 billion US dollars to Volta, an infrastructure start-up company that was only a few months old.

Anthropic A large order of tens of billions of computing power was placed on an unknown recruit Volta: What it bought was a timetable, and the bet was that the opponent would not be thunderous. Anthropic handed over a computing service agreement worth 10 billion US dollars to Volta, an infrastructure start-up company that was only a few months old. In the past, contracts of this size were almost destined to go to Amazon, Microsoft, or Google—the only ones with the land, power, and balance sheets thick enough to train on the cutting edge. But times have changed: when money is no longer a scarce resource, electricity has become a real bottleneck, and the three major cloud giants can’t power new sites faster than new entrants, so the deal eventually fell to Volta Infra. After raising approximately US$300 million from investors such as NVIDIA and the Michael Dell family office, the company has been valued at US$2.4 billion, but it holds almost no hardware. Its computing power comes from the Bitcoin miner Bitdeer, which rents out 121MW of power in the Norwegian site for about US$4.7 billion for 16 years; the chips are supplied by NVIDIA, and the system integration is handed over to Dell. Volta, sandwiched in the middle, is responsible for financing, signing contracts, and connecting customers. In order to support this heavy bill, Volta has also arranged a $5 billion construction funding plan with Azora. CEO Ricard Boada unveiled this arrangement for the first time: a US$10 billion cooperation that brings about US$1.7 billion in revenue to the company every year. What is really intriguing is the risk structure. A company valued at $2.4 billion promises to deliver $10 billion in services while the equipment is leased to mines - the risks on the other side of the scale are clearly visible. For Anthropic, what it buys is not a server, but an accurate timetable; in order to compete for speed, it swallows the counterparty risk that has never been shouldered by any ultra-large-scale cloud vendor contract. When "power supply speed" is more fatal than "who has the money" in large-scale model competitions, computing power contracts begin to bypass traditional giants and flow to middlemen who can light up the switch faster. Hardware vendors and mining farms are thus pushed to key nodes in the supply chain. via AI News (author: AI Base)