Nvidia, Dell Back AI Cloud Startup Volta at $2.4 Billion Value

Nvidia, Dell Back AI Cloud Startup Volta at $2.4 Billion Value Volta Infra Holdings Ltd., a new artificial intelligence cloud company, has raised $300 million in venture funding and secured an additional $5 billion worth of financing to help a wider mix of technology companies gain access to costly AI chips. The funding, set to be announced Tuesday, values Volta at $2.4 billion, and was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter Capital. Nvidia Corp. and Michael Dell also participated. Azora, the asset-management firm providing the financing pool from a mix of banks for Volta customers, invested in an earlier round. Volta also said it has landed a $10 billion contract to provide cloud computing capacity to a leading AI developer, but declined to name the company. The agreement runs for six years, according to Volta. The startup was founded earlier this year by Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio, two former executives from Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.’s infrastructure business. Volta’s goal is to make it easier for top AI labs and smaller startups to pay for Nvidia’s cutting-edge chips. The concern, Boada said, is that only the largest businesses with strong balance sheets can afford the upfront costs. “We saw a massive opportunity and a massive gap in the market,” Boada said in an interview. As tech companies ratchet up spending on chips and data centers to support AI, more firms have started offering new financing vehicles. Broadcom Inc. is working with Apollo Global Management Inc. and Blackstone Inc. to help fund chips for Anthropic PBC. CoreWeave Inc. has financed Nvidia chip purchases using various tactics, including leveraging the strong credit ratings of customers like Meta Platforms Inc. And Nvidia has also held talks to help fund a massive OpenAI data center, including possibly financing $350 billion of the ChatGPT maker’s purchases of its chips, Bloomberg News has reported. Some of those tie-ups have been criticized for being circular in nature. These deals create an increasingly interconnected web of dependencies between technology suppliers and AI developers that risks magnifying losses if AI demand fails to live up to the lofty expectations. Andreesen Horowitz has previously eschewed investments in so-called neoclouds and AI data center startups, but was drawn to Volta because of its founders’ experience in financing projects and lining up power agreements, said Raghu Raghuram, managing partner at the venture firm. To succeed, companies need “to master the financial complexities of building and operating new clouds and selling to customers,” he said. Volta said it has secured 1 gigawatt of power for data centers in the near term. The $10 billion contract will be delivered in partnership with Bitdeer Technologies Group, a Bitcoin miner that operates data centers, using a site in Norway that will offer 133 megawatts of capacity. Volta also plans to develop sites in Texas and Wyoming, Boada said. It’s aiming to deploy multiple gigawatts of capacity by 2030. (A single gigawatt is enough to power up to 750,000 US homes at any given time.) Dell Technologies Inc. will also act as a technology partner to Volta, providing gear to its facilities.