This London AI Startup Just Landed a $10 Billion Deal

Jan de Vries · 2026-08-05

London-based AI cloud startup Volta just burst onto the scene with a valuation that turns heads. The company has emerged from stealth after closing its Seed and Series A rounds, now valued at $2.4 billion. That's a serious number for a company that, until now, has been quietly building in the background. Led by Azora, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, and NVIDIA, the rounds pulled in $300 million, according to Bloomberg. Strategic investors like Michael Dell's family office and Matter Venture Partners also joined the cap table. But the real headline? Volta has reportedly secured a $10 billion compute deal with Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude. Bloomberg first reported the partnership, which will see Volta and Bitdeer develop an AI factory in Europe. ### What Volta Actually Does Volta isn't just another cloud provider. It's a fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform and NVIDIA Cloud Partner. The company develops, finances, builds, and operates AI factories—bringing together institutional capital, powered land, data centers, compute, software, and operations under one roof. Think of it as the utility company for compute, but for the AI age. Ricard Boada, co-founder and CEO, puts it simply: "Compute has become a new infrastructure asset class, with AI models and applications as the verticals built on top. Every technology revolution has run on a physical layer beneath it. Railways carried industrialisation. Electricity lit manufacturing. Fibre carried the internet." ### The Financing Bottleneck Here's the thing: the biggest hurdle for AI infrastructure isn't demand, power, or even chips. It's financing. The world's largest tech companies can fund their own AI buildouts, but frontier labs and startups are stuck renting scarce cloud capacity. Volta's bet is that by treating compute like infrastructure—financed with long-term, low-cost capital—they can unlock a new wave of AI innovation. To back that up, Volta has set up an AI Infrastructure Programme with Azora, a Madrid-based real estate and infrastructure investment manager, to provide $5 billion in financing for future AI factories. That's on top of the $10 billion deal already in hand. ### What's Next for Volta The first project, located in Norway, will be a 133 MW deployment powered by NVIDIA Vera Rubin systems. That's just the start. Volta's development pipeline already exceeds 1 GW of near-term power capacity across North America and Europe, with plans to scale to multiple gigawatts by 2030 using NVIDIA's DSX platform. Founded in 2026 by Boada and Chief Corporate Development Officer Sofia Gumuzio, Volta is moving fast. The company's mission is to build "The Utility of Compute"—making AI infrastructure as reliable and invisible as electricity, but with transparent pricing built to last. "AI is transforming compute from a technology product into critical infrastructure," Boada says. "Meeting that demand requires a platform that can mobilise infrastructure capital, secure power, and execute at industrial scale while moving at the pace of AI innovation." For anyone watching the AI infrastructure space, Volta is a name to remember. With heavyweight backers, a massive contract, and a clear vision, this London startup is positioning itself as a major player in the new compute economy.