Anthropic, a prominent player in the AI industry, has been identified as the unnamed customer behind a massive $13.7 billion, six-year computing contract with Rum Group, according to a report by The Information. Rum Group, the parent company of video platform Rumble, disclosed the contract last month but did not reveal the customer's identity at the time.

The deal is the latest in a series of compute agreements Anthropic has signed over the past year, including contracts with Google, SpaceX, and smaller cloud providers like Nscale. These agreements collectively add up to at least 14.8GW of capacity, with a total cost of up to $517 billion over the next decade, before the Rum contract.

Rum Group described the contract in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, stating that an affiliate had signed the agreement with an "unaffiliated U.S.-based third party cloud customer". The customer will purchase GPU access and GPU services from Rum Group's site in Maysville, Georgia, which is still under development.

The contract is structured in three tranches of equal value, worth approximately $13.7 billion in total. The third tranche is contingent upon the customer approving a proposed delivery date. Additionally, the customer received a warrant to buy up to 50,808,408 Rum Group shares at $0.01 each, with half of the shares vesting as the customer buys each of the three tranches.

Rum Group expects to raise debt or equity to cover the costs associated with the contract, warning that new equity could significantly dilute existing shareholders. The company plans to borrow money to pay for the data center, which was initially developed by Northern Data, a German provider of AI cloud and data centre services acquired by Rumble in June.

The deal marks a significant expansion of Rum Group's business, which has traditionally focused on video platforms. The company's cloud business, Quake AI, is poised to become a major player in the AI industry, with a large fleet of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs across 10 data centres.

Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, recently called for the AI industry to slow down, citing concerns about the rapid development of AI technologies. The company is also preparing to go public, with a listing on Nasdaq potentially coming as soon as October.

Cet article a été rédigé avec l'assistance de l'IA.
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