- London-based Volta has raised $300m at a $2.4bn valuation and announced a six-year cloud contract worth $10bn.
- The agreement covers a 133 MW Norwegian data centre using Nvidia systems, although the customer was not named by Volta.
- The project shows how AI companies are contracting for power and computing infrastructure before construction is complete.
Seven month-old infrastructure start-up Volta has secured a $10bn cloud-computing contract as investors race to finance the electricity, data centres and processors required by AI companies.
The six-year agreement will provide dedicated computing capacity to an unnamed AI laboratory from a planned data centre in Tydal, Norway. Volta said the 133 MW development would use Nvidia Vera Rubin systems and form the first project in a pipeline exceeding 1 GW across Europe and North America.
Bloomberg identified the customer as Anthropic, developer of the Claude chatbot, citing sources familiar with the transaction. Volta has not confirmed the identity directly.
The company has raised $300m in seed and Series A financing at a valuation of $2.4bn. Backers include Azora, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, Nvidia, Michael Dell’s family office and Matter Venture Partners.
It has also established a $5bn financing programme with Azora for future “AI factories”. That figure represents a pool of infrastructure capital rather than equity raised directly by Volta.
Volta was founded by former Brookfield executives Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio. Its business model combines project finance, powered land, data centre construction, computing equipment and cloud software under one platform.
“Compute has become a new infrastructure asset class, with AI models and applications as the verticals built on top,” Boada said. Volta intends to finance long-term data centre assets using contracted customer revenues in much the same way that infrastructure investors fund power networks or communications towers.
The Norwegian development will be delivered with Bitdeer, which owns the Tydal campus. Bitdeer has signed a 16-year lease and services agreement with a Volta subsidiary covering 121 MW of IT load, supported by 133 MW of gross capacity.
The lease is expected to generate $4.7bn of revenue for Bitdeer over its initial term, although Volta can terminate without a fee after ten years. Delivery is planned in two stages, at the end of 2026 and in March 2027. Bitdeer still requires around $500m to complete the campus and expects to raise additional debt.
Those terms provide more substance than a conventional non-binding data centre announcement, but important execution risks remain. The computing contract extends beyond currently operational capacity, the customer is undisclosed and the facility depends on timely construction, hardware deliveries and financing.
The project also illustrates Norway’s advantages in the competition for AI investment. Abundant hydroelectric generation, cooler temperatures and relatively low-cost power make large computing loads easier to accommodate than in markets with congested networks and higher electricity prices.
Those considerations are key, given that Volta is headquartered in London but has selected Norway for its first major physical development. Britain is trying to attract AI infrastructure through data centre planning reforms and AI Growth Zones, yet grid queues and electricity costs remain significant obstacles.
NESO’s reformed connections process has identified approximately 99 GW of priority demand projects, including data centres. Meeting even a fraction of that potential load will require new generation and networks as well as decisions about which projects provide sufficient economic value to justify scarce connection capacity.
Volta’s deal suggests compute is beginning to be financed like energy-intensive heavy infrastructure. The unanswered question is whether revenue from AI customers will remain sufficiently predictable to support the long-term debt structures now being assembled around it.
