Nvidia anchors Anthropic's $35B compute deal as circular financing fears mount
What's the deal? Anthropic has signed a $35 billion cloud compute deal backed by Nvidia, according to a Wall Street JournalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → report. Anthropic will rent GPU compute from Lambda, an Nvidia-backed cloud provider, while Nvidia supplies the chips and holds the lease on the underlying data center. The site is a 700MW campus in Nueces County, Texas, being developed by Hut 8Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
What the anchor role buys: Nvidia plays three roles in one transaction — chip supplier, equity backer of the intermediate cloud, and lease anchor on the physical site. It signed its own agreement with Hut 8 weeks earlier to secure that capacity, with Lambda now plugging in to provide compute to Anthropic. The figure represents a contracted commitment across a multi-year term, distinct from reported revenue.
Why now? The deal follows a separate $45 billion agreement Anthropic signed earlier in August with another Nvidia-backed cloud provider. Nvidia closed Q2 FY27 with $279 billion in supply obligations and $108.5 billion in guarantee obligations for AI cloud and data center partners.
What could go wrong? Critics call the structure circular financing: Nvidia underwrites the facility, backs the tenant, and supplies the silicon that generates rental revenue flowing back through the chain. Chief financial officer Colette Kress addressed the framing on the Q2 FY27 call. "We recognize the scale of this support, and we know some will call this circular financing. We see it differently," she said, adding that the platform "is fungible and durable and can be redeployed to support other customers."
The wider risk map is denser. Days sales outstanding stretched to 60 days from 45 on extended payment terms for large customers, inventory reached $32 billion ahead of the Vera Rubin ramp, and gross margin is guided to bottom at 71% to 72% in Q4 as memory costs climb.
The numbers: Nvidia shares traded at $219.37 intraday on September 1, 2026, down 0.64% from the prior close, though the stock is up 18.52% year to date. Market capitalisation sits at $5.33 trillion. Kress said Nvidia has "invested nearly 50 billion in the Frontier AI Labs" and expects AI lab demand supported by its balance sheet to represent "roughly a quarter of our business next year."
The signal: The Anthropic pact shows how tightly Nvidia's reported growth is now bound to counterparties that cannot yet independently finance the compute they consume. As Bank of AmericaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → analyst Vivek Arya put it, many of these investments aim to help frontier labs "especially OpenAI and Anthropic, but both of them are designing their own custom chips." The loop that powers Nvidia's ascent is also the one skeptics are watching most closely.
Read more: 247wallst.com
Image credit: FritzchensFritz
