Anthropic books $35B from Lambda in Texas. The rent underneath is $1.86M per megawatt

Anthropic signed a $35 billion cloud deal with Lambda for a data center in Texas.

"Anthropic has signed a cloud-computing deal worth $35 billion with Lambda," a source familiar with the matter said, as reported by Reuters on Monday.

Lambda is a cloud provider that Nvidia backs as an investor. The deal covers roughly 350 megawatts at the Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, developed by Hut 8.

Journal reporting adds the structure. The Wall Street Journal reported first that Nvidia holds the facility lease itself, that Lambda pays Nvidia for that space, and that Lambda installs Nvidia chips inside it before selling the finished capacity to Anthropic.

Nvidia is an investor in both parties.

Nobody has confirmed Anthropic's terms. Anthropic declined to comment, and Nvidia, Lambda and Hut 8 did not respond to requests, the outlets said.

The one filed number is the rent

Hut 8 disclosed its side of the arrangement, and the filing prices the campus precisely.

"Base-term contract value for the full campus rises to $19.6 billion," Hut 8 said in its July 20 announcement.

That comes to $1.86 million per megawatt a year across 704 megawatts and fifteen years of triple-net leases (rent with taxes and upkeep paid by the tenant). A 3 percent annual escalator runs through it.

The reported compute contract writes its own math. $35 billion across 350 megawatts over a six-year term, the term a separate source gave AFP, comes to about $16.7 million per megawatt a year.

Nine dollars of compute sit on one dollar of rent.

The spread buys GPUs, networking, power, cooling, staffing, and margin. Most of it buys silicon, and that silicon depreciates in two to three years while the lease runs fifteen.

Follow the money down the stack

Hut 8 shows how the cheapest layer got the best paper.

The company closed $4.25 billion of senior secured notes in June 2026, two months before any Anthropic agreement was reported. Lenders priced those notes against fifteen years of fixed rent from a high-investment-grade tenant.

Lambda followed with a $926 million senior secured term loan on August 27, led by Morgan Stanley, to fund GPU infrastructure for a committed customer deployment.

The financing sequence runs from guaranteed rent to leased chips to a lab with unconfirmed terms on top. Nvidia sits at three points in the stack: lessor, chip supplier, and investor.

Delivery is not instant. Hut 8 said initial energization stays on schedule for the first quarter of 2027, with Phase 2 data halls in the second quarter of 2028.

I get the sense the scarce asset was never the chips. Hut 8 locked 1,000 megawatts from AEP Texas before any tenant existed, then redesigned its first hall around Nvidia architecture for a 57 percent capacity gain inside the same footprint.

The unresolved edge is the paperwork itself. The $35 billion is a reported number with no named source on record, so the January-style confirmations could still reprice it.

Source