Anthropic has been identified as the previously unnamed customer behind Rum Group’s $13.7 billion, six-year GPU services agreement, The Information reported on September 13, resolving a question that had hung over the deal since Rum Group disclosed it in an SEC filing in August.
Rum Group, the company formerly known as Rumble, signed the contract in late August for GPU capacity at its data center campus in Maysville, Georgia. The site is still under development and is expected to be operational in the first quarter of 2027. At the time of the filing, the customer was described only as a US-based third-party cloud company.
The contract is structured in three tranches of roughly $4.57 billion each, with the third contingent on the customer approving a delivery schedule. Rum Group also issued the customer a 10-year warrant for up to 50.8 million Class A shares at $0.01 each, vesting as service purchases are fulfilled. The company said at the time that it does not currently have the financing needed to build out the required infrastructure, and that it plans to raise capital through debt or equity. Its obligations under the contract are not contingent on securing that financing.
Why the pairing is awkward
Rum Group is not a neutral infrastructure vendor. The company hosts President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform and rebranded in June 2026 after completing its acquisition of German AI cloud firm Northern Data, which added roughly 22,000 Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs to its newly launched Quake AI platform. The Maysville campus was originally pursued by Northern Data, which announced plans in December 2024 for a 120 megawatt site expanding to 180 megawatts.
Anthropic, by contrast, has positioned itself as the safety-first lab, and its CEO Dario Amodei published an essay over the weekend calling for the industry to slow frontier AI development. The company’s compute strategy has otherwise run through established partners: Google, Amazon, SpaceX and Nscale. The Information reports the cumulative secured compute across those relationships now reaches at least 14.8 gigawatts.
Neither Anthropic nor Rum Group has confirmed the customer’s identity on the record. The report attributes the disclosure to a person familiar with the matter, alongside Rum Group’s own SEC filing language.
What it says about the compute market
The deal fits a pattern. Anthropic’s 2026 compute commitments now total well over $100 billion, including a $35 billion six-year deal with Nvidia-backed Lambda announced in September, a $45 billion agreement with Nscale for capacity in West Virginia, more than $100 billion committed to Amazon Web Services over a decade, and a $30 billion commitment to Microsoft Azure. Nvidia has invested in both Anthropic and Lambda, and the Lambda deal routes through a Hut 8 facility in Nueces County, Texas that Nvidia leases and sublets to Lambda.
That Anthropic would take capacity from a politically connected, thinly capitalized provider underscores how tight GPU supply remains. Rum Group’s stock jumped more than 8 percent in premarket trading when the deal was first disclosed in August and rose 12.8 percent in the afternoon session as investors digested it. The company posted a net loss of $79.1 million on $40.4 million of revenue in the quarter ended June 30, and CEO Chris Pavlovski has said Quake AI will compete directly with specialized cloud providers.
For Anthropic, the economics are straightforward: model training and inference demand more compute than any single provider can supply, so the lab signs overlapping agreements and accepts counterparty risk in exchange for reserved capacity. For Rum Group, a customer of Anthropic’s caliber validates its pivot from video platform to AI infrastructure and gives it a recurring-revenue anchor to raise capital against.
Wider context
The disclosure lands in a crowded week for Anthropic. Reuters reported on September 11 that Nvidia is considering investing up to $10 billion in Anthropic’s initial public offering, which could raise as much as $100 billion at a valuation around $2 trillion and would be the largest IPO on record, surpassing SpaceX. Anthropic has not finalized an IPO decision, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in March that the chipmaker’s investment in Anthropic would probably be its last in the company once it goes public.
The company is also at the center of the industry’s pacing debate. Amodei’s essay, We Must Pace the Frontier, published Saturday, proposed independent monitoring of models during training, industry-wide regulation and global coordination. Sam Altman and Elon Musk both endorsed the call, with Altman writing on X that OpenAI will do the same, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella followed on Saturday with an essay welcoming deliberate pacing and a code of conduct for Microsoft’s MAI models. House Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, said on CNN’s State of the Union that Congress will not lead on AI safety legislation and warned a rushed emergency session would cost the US the race against China.
The company’s own workforce tells a more restless story. Jacob Coxon, a pretraining researcher who moved from OpenAI to Anthropic earlier this year because he believed it took safety more seriously, resigned on September 9, writing that neither company is acting responsibly and that both are racing toward self-improving superintelligence. Two more safety researchers, Joe Benton from Anthropic’s Scalable Oversight team and Josh Engels from Google DeepMind, resigned on September 12 to join the independent evaluation nonprofit METR.
The Maysville site remains the practical question. Rum Group must build out 120 megawatts of capacity, secure financing it says it does not yet have, and deliver GPU services on a schedule a trillion-dollar-valued customer will accept. The warrant structure ties Anthropic’s equity upside to that delivery, which aligns incentives but also concentrates risk: if the buildout slips, the third tranche and the warrant vesting slip with it. Anthropic’s diversified strategy exists precisely to spread that risk across providers, and Maysville is now one more line on a very long list.