Anthropic Signs $10B Compute Deal With a Startup That Didn't Exist Six Months Ago

Volta launched in early 2026, founded by former managers from the Brookfield investment fund. Less than six months later, Anthropic signed a $10B compute contract with the startup spanning six years: 133 MW in Norway at a former Bitdeer Bitcoin-mining facility, Nvidia Vera Rubin chips, with capacity delivered in two phases by March 2027. Volta itself has already raised $300M from Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, and Michael Dell at a $2.4B valuation.

The race for compute has gone so far that the biggest AI labs are literally spinning up new infrastructure suppliers from scratch. Traditional cloud capacity is no longer enough — and Norwegian Bitcoin data centers and six-month-old startups are now being plugged into the training pipeline for frontier models.