Volta Valued at $2.4 Billion, Signs $10 Billion AI Cloud Deal

AI infrastructure startup Volta Infra, just seven months old, said on August 4 it raised funding at a $2.4 billion valuation and secured a $10 billion contract to provide cloud-computing services in Europe, alongside crypto mining firm Bitdeer Technologies.

Bloomberg News reported that the unnamed AI company behind the six-year contract is Anthropic, citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters said it could not independently verify that. Anthropic declined to comment and Volta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The agreement covers computing capacity at a Bitdeer-operated data centre in Norway with 133 megawatts of power, running on Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips. Volta said the Norway project is the first in a development pipeline that exceeds one gigawatt of near-term power capacity across North America and Europe.

Volta also launched a $5 billion AI infrastructure program with asset manager Azora to finance what it called AI factories. The startup raised $300 million across a seed round and Series A financing, led by Azora, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, and Nvidia.

The deal adds to a string of computing and investment agreements Anthropic has signed with SpaceX, AMD, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Micron as it races to secure the massive infrastructure needed to train and run large AI models. For Volta, the contract represents an unusually fast ascent for a company that did not exist at the start of the year, underscoring the intense demand for data centre capacity that is pulling new entrants into the market.