What Was Formally Disclosed Is the Lease, Not the Customer
Bitdeer issued a press release the same day: its subsidiary Tydal Data Center AS signed a 16-year colocation and services lease with a Volta subsidiary covering 121 MW of IT load, supported by roughly 133 MW of total power, representing about $4.7 billion in contracted revenue over the initial term. An eight-year renewal option could take the potential total to about $8.0 billion over 24 years. The opening term averages roughly $202 per kW per month with 3% annual escalators, delivered in two phases targeted for December 31, 2026 and March 31, 2027. The campus is designed for a PUE of about 1.1 on 100% renewable hydropower, with hardware supplied by Dell and Nvidia's newest Vera Rubin chips. Bitdeer retains full ownership of the site and issued no shares or warrants for the transaction; its stock rose as much as 14% on the news.
The Customer's Identity Rests on Sourcing Alone
Volta was founded this January by former Brookfield Asset Management executives to lease AI capacity and help clients finance chip purchases. It announced a $300 million round the same day at a $2.4 billion valuation, backed by a16z, Altimeter, Nvidia, and Michael Dell. The financial obligations behind the $10 billion contract are supported by roughly $1.3 billion in letters of credit expected to be arranged by J.P. Morgan and another global financial institution. Volta's announcement describes the customer only as "a leading AI lab," CEO Ricard Boada declined to identify it, Anthropic and Bitdeer declined to comment, and Reuters said explicitly that it could not independently verify the claim. In other words, "Anthropic is spending $10 billion" is what Bloomberg's sources say, not something any party has formally confirmed.
Two Threads Worth Watching
First, the supply side is changing hands: bitcoin miners are converting campuses into AI colocation, players like Bitdeer are pivoting from mining to hosting, and Nordic hydropower plus low PUE have become the pitch. Second, the circularity argument: over the past year, a string of arrangements around the leading model companies has been criticized for weaving chip vendors, clouds, and labs into mutual dependence that would amplify losses if demand disappoints. For developers, what matters about a contract like this is not today's pricing but the capacity ceiling for frontier models around 2027 — the rate limits and queues you actually hit then, not the press release.
via: Bitdeer's official announcement (GlobeNewswire full text), Bloomberg: Anthropic Inks Computing Deal With Nvidia-Backed Cloud Startup Volta, Data Center Dynamics report; verified 2026-08-04