Credit: PhotoGranary02 via Shutterstock.com Anthropic is the unnamed customer behind a $13.7bn, six-year computing contract that Rum Group disclosed last month, The Information reported on Sunday. Rum Group owns the video platform Rumble. Reporters Valida Pau and Phoebe Liu cited one person familiar with the matter. Neither Anthropic nor Rum Group had publicly confirmed the report at the time of publication.
TNW has not independently verified it. The deal adds to a run of compute agreements Anthropic has signed over the past year. The earlier ones include Google, SpaceX and smaller cloud providers such as Nscale. Together they add up to at least 14.8GW of capacity, according to The Information.
The publication put their cost at up to $517bn over the next decade, before the Rum contract. TNW has covered several of them, including a $45bn deal with Nscale, $35bn with Lambda, and a 20-year contract with Riot Platforms. What Rum Group told regulators Rum Group described the contract in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission dated 24 August. An affiliate had signed the agreement the day before with an “unaffiliated U.S.-based third party cloud customer”, the filing says.
The customer will buy GPU access and GPU services. The services will run from Rum Group’s site in Maysville, Georgia, which is still under development. The order comes in three tranches of equal value, worth about $13.7bn in total. The third tranche depends on the customer approving a proposed delivery date.
The customer also received a warrant to buy up to 50,808,408 Rum Group shares at $0.01 each. Half of those shares vest as the customer buys each of the three tranches. The other half can vest in five steps if the customer signs further agreements for substantial additional GPU services. The financing is still to come “We do not currently have financing to fund these expenditures, and our obligations under the Commercial Agreement are not subject to any financing condition or contingency,” the filing states.
Rum Group expects to raise debt or equity to cover the cost. It warned that new equity could significantly dilute existing shareholders. Rum Group plans to borrow money to pay for the data centre, The Information reported. Northern Data, which began the Maysville project, had said the site would be running by late this year, The Information reported.
According to the publication, it is unclear whether that timeline still holds. From video platform to cloud provider Rumble built its business as a video platform. In June, it closed its acquisition of Northern Data, a German provider of AI cloud and data centre services. The company said the deal brought it about 22,000 Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs across 10 data centres.
The parent company took the name RUM Group the next day, and the cloud business became Quake AI. Tether, the company behind the USDT stablecoin, was Northern Data’s majority shareholder and took Rum Group shares and warrants in the deal. It now beneficially owns 48.7% of Rum Group’s Class A shares, according to a June filing with the SEC. The Information described Rum Group as having long-standing ties to the Trump administration.
Truth Social, the platform run by Trump Media & Technology Group, moved its website and apps to Rumble’s cloud in April 2022. A year earlier, Rumble announced an investment led by Narya, a venture firm co-founded by JD Vance. Peter Thiel also took part. Vance is now the US vice-president.
A slowdown call and an IPO The report came a day after Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called on the AI industry to slow down. Anthropic is also preparing to go public. It has chosen Nasdaq for a listing that could come as soon as October.
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