The company has secured a deal to provide Anthropic with computing capacity for six years, according to a Bloomberg report.
Volta Infra, a new AI infrastructure start-up, has emerged from stealth with a valuation of $2.4bn after completing a seed funding round and Series A round led by Azora, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter and Nvidia.
The rounds also saw participation from strategic investors including the family office of Michael Dell and Matter Venture Partners.
Volta, founded earlier this year by Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio, aims to help top AI labs and start-ups access key infrastructure. The company develops, finances, builds and operates AI factories by integrating “institutional capital, powered land, data centres, compute, software and operations under a single platform”.
The months-old start-up raised $300m in venture funding, according to Bloomberg, and also announced a deal with asset company Azora to provide $5bn of financing for the “next generation of AI factories” developed by Volta.
“Compute has become a new infrastructure asset class, with AI models and applications as the verticals built on top,” said Boada. “Every technology revolution has run on a physical layer beneath it.
“We founded Volta because compute should be financed, developed, and commercialised with the principles and scale of infrastructure.”
The start-up also announced that it has secured a $10bn strategic partnership with an unnamed AI lab to develop an AI factory in Norway alongside Bitdeer, a Bitcoin miner that operates data centres.
The project – the first within Volta’s broader development pipeline – will comprise a 133MW deployment powered by Nvidia Vera Rubin systems.
As well as the site in Norway, Volta plans to build US sites in Texas and Wyoming, Boada told Bloomberg. The start-up aims to deploy multiple gigawatts of capacity by 2030.
Bloomberg reported that the unnamed AI lab involved in the $10bn Norway site deal is actually AI giant Anthropic, with the publication citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. As part of the deal, Anthropic will reportedly have access to Volta’s computing capacity at the site for six years.
Anthropic has recently been making a series of deals to boost its access to vital AI infrastructure and compute.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the company announced a partnership with AMD for 2GW of its latest-generation chips in a bid to boost AI capacity and meet growing demands. The Wall Street Journal reported that the deal between the companies is worth “tens of billions of dollars”.
Anthropic has also made similar deals with Broadcom and Amazon.
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