Is Nvidia’s $35 Billion Anthropic Pact the Ultimate Circular Financing Play?
Nvidia just anchored a $35 billion compute deal where it supplies the chips, backs the cloud tenant, and holds the lease on the data center, raising a question even its own CFO felt compelled to address on the earnings call.
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$35 Billion at a Glance
$35 billion. That is the size of the cloud compute deal Anthropic just signed, backed by NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction), according to a Wall Street Journal report. Under the arrangement, Anthropic will rent GPU compute from Lambda, an Nvidia backed cloud provider. NVIDIA supplies the chips and holds the lease on the underlying data center, a 700 megawatt campus in Nueces County, Texas being developed by Hut 8. The figure represents a contracted commitment across a multi year term, distinct from reported revenue.
What the Anchor Role Really Buys
NVIDIA is playing three roles in one transaction: chip supplier, equity backer of the intermediate cloud (Lambda), and lease anchor on the physical site. NVIDIA had signed its own agreement with Hut 8 weeks earlier to secure that capacity, with Lambda now plugging in to provide compute to Anthropic. The 700 megawatt campus is a reminder that the chips are only part of the buildout: the power, cooling, and networking suppliers behind sites like this are the subject of a free report we put together here. The Anthropic deal follows a separate $45 billion agreement Anthropic signed earlier in August with EnCore, another Nvidia backed cloud provider.
The mechanics compound existing balance sheet commitments. NVIDIA closed Q2 FY27 with $279.00 billion in supply obligations and $108.5 billion in guarantee obligations for AI cloud and data center partners. CFO Colette Kress told analysts NVIDIA has “invested nearly 50 billion in the Frontier AI Labs” and expects AI lab demand supported by its balance sheet to represent “roughly a quarter of our business next year.”
Market Reaction Since the Filing
NVDA is up 5.9% over the past week and 18.52% year to date through August 31, 2026. Shares traded at $219.37 intraday on September 1, 2026, off 0.64% from the prior close of $220.78. Market cap sits at $5.33 trillion.
Bear Case: Balance Sheet as a Service
The Anthropic pact is a cleaner example of the circular financing critique than any equity investment NVIDIA has disclosed. NVIDIA underwrites the facility, backs the cloud tenant, and supplies the silicon that generates the rental revenue flowing back through the chain. Kress acknowledged the framing on the Q2 FY27 call: “We recognize the scale of this support, and we know some will call this circular financing. We see it differently.” Her defense rested on fungibility: “The NVIDIA Compute platform is fungible and durable and can be redeployed to support other customers.”
The risk map is denser than a single deal. Days sales outstanding stretched to 60 days from 45 days on extended payment terms for large investment-grade customers. Inventory reached $32 billion ahead of the Vera Rubin ramp. Gross margin is guided to 74.0% in Q3, and management said it will “bottom in Q4 in the 71% to 72% range” as memory costs climb. Analyst Vivek Arya of Bank of America pressed the tension directly: “A lot of these investments are designed to help the frontier labs, especially OpenAI and Anthropic, but both of them are designing their own custom chips.”
The deal ties NVIDIA’s reported growth to counterparties whose “balance sheets and credit profiles” cannot yet independently finance the compute they consume. That is the same loop skeptics flagged when NVIDIA lined up Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to raise “over $500 billion of third-party capital” for the same customer set.
Bottom Line for Long Term Holders
The Anthropic pact is a stress test of NVIDIA’s ecosystem thesis. The company delivered Q2 FY27 revenue of $96.22 billion, up 105.85% year over year, and guided Q3 to $108.0 billion. The next scheduled catalyst for shareholders is the $0.25 quarterly dividend, with a record date of September 10, 2026 and payment on October 1, 2026. Whether $35 billion of Anthropic compute becomes recurring cash or a footnote on a guarantee schedule depends on one thing: how many tokens Claude sells.
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After two decades of patrolling the dark corners of suburbia as a police officer, Rich Duprey hung up his badge and gun to begin writing full time about stocks and investing. For the past 20 years he’s been cruising the markets looking for companies to lock up as long-term holdings in a portfolio while writing extensively on the broad sectors of consumer goods, technology, and industrials. Because his experience isn’t from the typical financial analyst track, Rich is able to break down complex topics into understandable and useful action points for the average investor. His writings have appeared on The Motley Fool, InvestorPlace, Yahoo! Finance, and Money Morning. He has been featured in both U.S. and international publications, including MarketWatch, Financial Times, Forbes, Fast Company, and USA Today.
