Anthropic Strikes $13.7 Billion Compute Deal With Trump-Linked Rum Group

Anthropic has signed a computing deal worth $13.7 billion over six years with Rum Group, a company with roots in social media and long-standing ties to the Trump administration, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The deal is the latest in a spate of cloud computing agreements Anthropic struck in the past year, with major cloud providers like Google, tech companies such as SpaceX and smaller neoclouds such as Nscale, amid skyrocketing demand for its Claude Code and Cowork products. The agreements total at least 14.8 gigawatts of compute capacity, costing as much as $517 billion over the next decade. The deal with Rum would add to that total.

Rum Group, formerly known as Rumble, had disclosed a major contract worth $13.7 billion in an August securities filing but did not name the customer.

Rum operates the Rumble video-sharing platform that’s popular among conservatives and hosts President Donald Trump’s Truth Social. Its early investors include Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance. In June it added an AI cloud business through the all-stock acquisition of German neocloud Northern Data valued at roughly $767 million. Rumble renamed itself as Rum Group after completing the acquisition.

The Northern Data acquisition gave Rum 22,000 Hopper-generation Nvidia GPUs, most of which are being rented out to customers in Europe and the U.S., as well as a data center site under development in Georgia.

Much relating to the Rum-Anthropic deal is uncertain. Anthropic would lease compute capacity at a Maysville, Georgia, data center, which is still being built. The facility has an elusive resource that’s currently in short supply: access to 120 megawatts of grid power, with potential to expand that to 180 MW. Northern Data had said last year that the site would be operational late this year, but it’s unclear whether that is still the timeline.

The project could cost more than $10 billion to build and outfit with expensive server chips, based on previous The Information reporting that it could cost $60 billion to build and power one gigawatt of AI data center capacity. Rum Group has not publicly said how much the Georgia data center will cost to complete.

Rum said in its August filing that it did not have financing to fund the construction of the data center facility or purchases of GPUs and other equipment needed to satisfy its new contract at the time, and that it expected to fund a substantial portion of the spending through additional debt or equity financing. Rum Group is planning to borrow money to finance the Georgia project, according to the person familiar with the situation.

Rum Group CEO Chris Pavlovski told The Information in June that the company was exploring a variety of options, preferably debt, to finance additional AI server chip purchases. At the time, he said discussions potentially included bringing in outside companies to provide credit support, meaning guarantees or other commitments to make the debt more attractive to investors.

As outlined in last month’s securities filing, Rum’s customer—Anthropic—is getting an option to buy as many as ‌51 ⁠million shares of Rum Group stock for just one cent each, according to the person familiar with the matter. Rum Group stock closed on Friday at $7.17. The company has 400 million shares outstanding, giving it a market capitalization currently of $2.8 billion.

Anthropic’s ability to exercise the options is tied to how much computing capacity it buys from Rum. Half is tied to the Maysville facility. Anthropic can exercise the other half of the options if it buys extra computing power of around 400-500 megawatts at an additional site Rum is developing, the person said.

As of June, Rum Group was looking to buy $270 million worth of Nvidia’s Blackwell 300 chips—the most advanced chips available in large quantities at the time—to fulfill a customer contract with Together AI, The Information previously reported.

Rumble was founded in 2013 as a YouTube alternative for smaller content creators, and gained traction among conservatives after the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In addition to hosting Trump’s Truth Social, Rumble carries official White House livestreams.

In May 2021, Rumble raised $25 million from investors including Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance in a funding round that valued Rumble at $500 million.