Volta Infrastructure, a London‑based startup, has secured a $10 billion partnership with Anthropic to construct an AI data centre in Norway, leveraging Nvidia hardware to support the Claude chatbot.
The agreement follows a recent funding round that valued Volta at $2.4 billion and attracted investors including Nvidia, Azora, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, and the Michael Dell family office.
Volta markets itself as a comprehensive AI infrastructure provider, integrating financing, land acquisition, power supply, hardware, and software under a single platform.
The first project will be situated in Norway and is intended to supply AI workloads for Anthropic’s chatbot platform.
Azora has committed a $5 billion AI infrastructure programme to finance Volta’s planned AI factories.
Founder Ricard Boada Rafart launched Volta in January with a nominal share capital of £1 and previously managed AI infrastructure deals at Brookfield Asset Management.
The board includes Andreessen Horowitz partners Shangda Xu and Raghu Raghuram, and former Brookfield employee Sofia Gumuzio.
Volta employs around 100 staff across London, Palo Alto, and New York and plans to file its first accounts by the end of September next year.
The company’s valuation is roughly two‑fifths that of Balfour Beatty, a 117‑year‑old infrastructure group with 26,000 employees and £10.8 billion in revenue.
Volta has indicated a broader near‑term development pipeline in North America and Europe but has not disclosed specific project details.
An Nvidia executive described the partnership as a significant milestone for European AI infrastructure and a step toward expanding reliable, scalable AI capacity across the region.
Investors and industry observers note that the surge in AI data‑centre funding raises questions about economic viability, especially in light of lower‑cost Chinese AI models, while energy costs and grid capacity remain critical determinants of new AI site locations.
Ofgem has launched a consultation on data‑centre connection reforms, proposing a fee based on megawatt capacity that reflects a jump in demand from 41 GW to 125 GW in a year, with data centres accounting for at least 80 GW.
The consultation closes on 16 September, and the energy market has already influenced AI project placement, exemplified by OpenAI’s pause of a UK data centre amid high industrial electricity prices and regulatory uncertainty.
