Anthropic’s second mega deal this week. They’re building a $35B data center in Texas.

Anthropic signs a $35 billion agreement with Lambda (an Nvidia-funded cloud company) for a 350 MW data center in Nueces County, Texas. This data center will be constructed by Hut 8, a crypto mining company turned AI infrastructure provider.

1$80 Billion in Seven Days

This is Anthropic’s second major infrastructure agreement in a week. Last week, they announced a $45 billion agreement with Nscale for a data center in West Virginia. Combined, these agreements amount to $80 billion in compute capacity — an unprecedented level of infrastructure investment in such a short timeframe.

2Why Anthropic Is Buying Up Compute

They claim that they are growing due to high demand for their product, Claude and Claude Code (a popular coding tool). They are gearing up for an IPO, so having as much infrastructure as possible is crucial for supporting large businesses and agentic use cases, which demand far more compute than normal chatbot queries.

Anthropic, Lambda, and Hut 8 have not officially commented on the agreement. However, Nvidia is involved through leasing the building. Reuters reports that the 15-year lease agreement with an anonymous customer that Hut 8 announced in July 2026 is for this data center.

3A Shift in the AI Race

This represents a larger trend where competition in AI is moving from model architecture to compute capacity. If you don’t secure enough GPUs and power beforehand, you could run into bottlenecks at the exact moment when demand for agentic AI rises.