From Pymnts · PYMNTS · · 1m 30s
Anthropic's $13.7B bet on a Trump-linked cloud
Anthropic signed a six-year compute deal with the owner of Rumble, and the data center it needs is not built or funded yet.
In brief
Anthropic signed a six-year compute deal with the owner of Rumble, and the data center it needs is not built or funded yet. Anthropic is buying compute so aggressively that it will lease capacity from an unbuilt, unfinanced data center owned by a politically wired newcomer. Originally reported by Pymnts.
A $13.7 billion handshake
Anthropic signed a six-year compute deal with Rum Group, a social media and AI infrastructure company, according to a source cited by The Information on September 14.
Who Rum Group is
Rum owns Rumble, the conservative-leaning video platform that hosts Trump's Truth Social. Peter Thiel and Vice President J.D. Vance were early investors.
A video company turned neocloud
Rumble only entered the AI cloud business in June, when it bought German neocloud Northern Data and renamed itself Rum Group.
Part of a buying spree
Anthropic has struck cloud deals with Google, SpaceX and smaller neoclouds like Nscale. Excluding Rum, they total at least 14.8 gigawatts and up to $517 billion over the next decade.
“costing up to $517 billion across the next decade”
The data center does not exist
Anthropic is leasing capacity at a Georgia site still under construction. Northern Data promised it would run by late this year, but nobody will confirm that timeline now.
“many aspects of the Anthropic-Rum deal are unclear”
And it is not paid for
Rum plans to borrow to fund the build. In August the company disclosed it lacked the financing for both the facility and the equipment it needs.
The essence
Anthropic is buying compute so aggressively that it will lease capacity from an unbuilt, unfinanced data center owned by a politically wired newcomer.
