A year ago, the site in Tydal, Norway, was mining bitcoin. Now it's turning into one of the biggest compute hubs for Claude — Anthropic has signed a six-year, $10 billion deal with startup Volta, Bloomberg reports.
The structure has several layers. Volta, founded in January by former Brookfield Asset Management executives, is leasing capacity from Bitdeer, a bitcoin miner that has spent the past few years converting parts of its footprint into AI infrastructure. Bitdeer signed its own 16-year colocation lease with Volta worth roughly $4.7 billion, with an eight-year extension option that could push the total to $8 billion. Anthropic ends up as the end customer, with two intermediaries sitting between it and the actual electricity.
The 133-megawatt facility (121 MW of IT load) will run entirely on hydropower — abundant in Norway, and cheaper and cleaner than pulling from US grids already strained by AI demand. Dell is supplying the hardware, built around Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which haven't even reached the broader market yet. The first phase is due online by the end of 2026, the second by March 2027.
One detail stands out: the financing. A $1.3 billion credit backstop has been arranged for the project, with JPMorgan among the banks involved. That's notable for the industry — lenders are now willing to guarantee debt tied to AI infrastructure deals, not just finance data centers outright.
Volta isn't Anthropic's only new partner. In recent months the company has struck deals with SpaceX, AMD and Akamai, while Amazon added another $5 billion to its investment. The pattern is clear: AI labs are running short on raw compute and are willing to work with former crypto miners just to secure power and floor space for chips.
For Bitdeer, it's a way to monetize capacity that mining alone no longer pays for as well — trading volatile bitcoin-mining revenue for a guaranteed, multi-year cash flow instead.
