Is Nvidia’s $35 Billion Anthropic Pact the Ultimate Circular Financing Play?

Is Nvidia’s $35 Billion Anthropic Pact the Ultimate Circular Financing Play?

Rich Duprey

Tue, September 1, 2026 at 8:12 PM GMT+3 4 min read

• NVDA +3.21%

Quick Read

• Nvidia holds three roles in Anthropic's $35 billion compute pact: chip supplier, Lambda equity backer, and lease anchor on a 700-megawatt Texas campus.

• Colette Kress acknowledged circular financing concerns but argued Nvidia's compute platform is fungible and redeployable, even as key customers design their own chips.

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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), 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."

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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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