WSS: Frontier labs driving neocloud leasing built on both third-party data centres and self-perform scenarios
It was a busy week as the sector came out of the Labour Day long weekend in the US and Canada. In the past week, we looked at the latest leasing activity from Anthropic as it continues to consume as much capacity as it can get its hands on. Recent media reports indicate Anthropic has signed $75b in two cloud infrastructure deals with Nscale and Lambda. The deals involve various pieces of the ecosystem. Nscale is developing its own data centre and substation in West Virginia that it will provide cloud services to Anthropic from, while Lambda is going to be a customer of Hut 8 for data centre colocation, and then provide cloud services directly to Anthropic. NVIDIA is said to be involved as well, not just providing GPU inventory of course, but helping secure critical infrastructure and backstopping data centre leases through its financial muscle. Needless to say, NVIDIA continues to be a critical part of the landscape and driver behind what gets done. The Anthropic lease with Lambda also provides some insight into some of the recent leasing Hut 8 has done. Hut 8 did not disclose a tenant for its 704MW lease in Nueces County, Texas, but it appears that Lambda is the tenant with Anthropic as the off-taker. Meanwhile, Anthropic continues to value speed-to-market and more readily available capacity as top priorities and is at the relatively early stage of building out or directly consuming data centre infrastructure itself.
Neocloud leasing continues to push forward and we saw Green Mountain secure a 14MW lease in the London area of the UK. Green Mountain’s parent company Azrieli Group in Israel is a listed company and reported its results, sharing some useful data points about the Green Mountain business, which is doing a significant volume of leasing in Norway with Chinese hyperscalers. Speaking of Chinese hyperscalers, Alibaba Cloud was active in the past week as it looks to expand globally in markets where geopolitics does not play as much of a factor. Alibaba Cloud opened a new cloud infrastructure region in Sao Paolo, Brazil and launched a third data centre in South Korea.
The neocloud landscape is also widening as silicon producers build cloud service delivery capabilities as a go-to-market strategy. We noted how Groq is building out capacity on a global basis and this week Cerebras began building capacity in Finland.
The Nordics and APAC regions also saw strategic activity of note in the last few weeks as they become more intertwined. KKR and Singtel led a consortium that completed its acquisition of Singapore’s STTGDC and Equinix’s acquisition of Iceland-based atNorth has now been completed as well. The Nordics region continues to be an expansion location for Chinese hyperscalers and the availability of green, low-cost energy remains a top selling point.
As noted above, Hut 8 now has three significant data centre leases and has made a hard pivot from cryptocurrency to the data centre business. This trend continues to play out at a rapid pace. We noted recently how Bitdeer is working on converting infrastructure assets from bitcoin to data centres and this week, we have a few details on what Keel Infrastructure has planned. It too is converting assets as it prepares to enter the data centre and cloud computing game. This trend is ongoing and accelerating.
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