A $50bn backlog, and Anthropic's $35bn

Lambda, an Nvidia-backed provider of GPU cloud computing, is raising up to $4bn at a pre-money valuation of $14.5bn in what would be its last private round before a stock market listing, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. Coatue Management and Blackstone are leading the round, according to TechCrunch, which summarised the Journal's report. A letter to the company's limited partners puts the listing in 2027, depending on execution and market conditions, The Economic Times reported, citing the Journal. A Lambda spokesperson declined to comment to the Journal, PYMNTS said.

A letter to investors reviewed by the Journal shows Lambda's backlog of contracted orders rising from $15bn in June to $50bn in September, a little more than three times as large in three months, by our arithmetic. The increase, $35bn, is the same size as one contract. In late August Anthropic signed a $35bn cloud deal with Lambda for a Texas data centre in Nueces County being developed by Hut 8, with about 350 megawatts of capacity, a source told Reuters; the Journal, which first reported the deal, said Nvidia itself would hold the lease. "While that might look like a hearty increase in demand, much of that increase appears to be driven by a $35 billion commitment from one company: Anthropic, which signed a deal with Lambda in late August," TechCrunch wrote. If the whole commitment is in the backlog, it is 70 per cent of it, by our calculation.

The price has moved with it. Lambda's previous equity round, more than $1.5bn in November 2025, valued it at $5.9bn after the money, according to Forge Global estimates cited by the Journal. A $14.5bn pre-money valuation is about two and a half times that; with the full $4bn, the post-money figure would be $18.5bn, our arithmetic again. The new money would arrive before public investors start reading the accounts.

Equity is the smaller part of how Lambda pays for chips. It has closed three secured debt deals this year, each for about $1bn: a $1bn credit facility in May; a $926m term loan B in August, priced at SOFR plus 3 percentage points, rated Baa2 by Moody's and due at the end of 2030, to fund GPUs for one investment-grade customer; and, on 1 October, a $1bn delayed-draw term loan at a fixed 6.78 per cent, rated Baa1 by Moody's and A (low) by Morningstar DBRS, maturing in May 2033. The last is drawn only as clusters enter service, supports three deployments for two investment-grade customers, and is secured by the GPU servers it buys and the contracted cash flows. Lambda did not name the customers.

"The capital in this offering underwrites infrastructure in decades, not quarters, and has funded us as a private company on the strength of our customer contracts," Michel Combes, Lambda's chief executive, said when the October loan closed. That is the model in brief: a signed contract with a creditworthy tenant becomes collateral, the collateral raises debt, and the debt buys the GPUs. It works as long as the tenants keep paying, which is why the concentration matters. TechCrunch noted that lenders are becoming choosier about whom they fund, and that Lambda's valuation may rest heavily on Anthropic's ability to keep paying.

Lambda would not be the first of these companies to arrive at public markets with one or two names dominating its order book. Nscale, the British GPU cloud that TechCrunch says is expected to begin trading soon, disclosed in its filing that 85 per cent of $103bn in contracted value came from Microsoft and Anthropic. CoreWeave and Nebius are already listed. For now Lambda's numbers come from a letter to its own investors, read by one newspaper; a listing would put them, and the customers behind them, in a prospectus.