Volta Infrastructure Holdings, a London-based start-up incorporated in January, has agreed a $10 billion data centre deal with Anthropic and raised funding from backers including Nvidia at a $2.4 billion valuation.
Volta said its first project is a planned AI data centre in Norway, to be powered by Nvidia systems, as part of the partnership with Anthropic, the AI group behind the Claude chatbot.
The company says it “develops, finances, builds and operates” AI data centres, or “AI factories” as it calls them, bringing together finance, land with local power supply and the hardware and software required by the AI industry “under a single platform”.
Alongside Nvidia, the chip maker, investors include Azora, a Spanish investment firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and Altimeter, a technology investor. The family office of Michael Dell, founder of Dell Technologies, has also invested.
Volta said Azora had established a $5 billion AI infrastructure programme to finance AI factories that Volta will develop.
Company filings show Ricard Boada Rafart, 33, set up Volta with £1 of share capital in January. Boada was previously a senior vice-president at Brookfield Asset Management’s infrastructure group, where he worked on AI infrastructure deals including a $5 billion partnership between Brookfield and Bloom Energy. His LinkedIn profile says he left Brookfield in January.
Volta’s other directors include Shangda Xu and Raghu Raghuram, both of Andreessen Horowitz, and Sofia Gumuzio, a former Brookfield employee who is Volta’s co-founder.
Volta says it has about 100 staff across sites in London, Palo Alto and New York. It may not file its first set of accounts until the end of September next year.
The $2.4 billion figure is roughly two fifths the valuation of Balfour Beatty, the 117-year-old FTSE 250 international infrastructure group, which has about 26,000 staff and reported revenues of £10.8 billion last year.
Volta declined to answer questions about the status of its projects but said it had a “broader near-term development pipeline” in North America and Europe.
Gavin McLaughlin, an Nvidia executive, said the Volta deal was “an important milestone for Europe” and “an exciting step toward expanding access to dependable, scalable AI infrastructure” across the region.
Boada said Volta was set up because AI infrastructure, or “compute”, should be “financed, developed, and commercialised with the principles and scale of infrastructure” so that it “works as reliably and invisibly as electricity”.
The round follows a comparable raise at Nscale, another London-based data centre start-up valued at $14.6 billion after a $2 billion round that also included Nvidia and which brought Nick Clegg and Sheryl Sandberg on to its board.
It also comes amid growing questions about the scale of investment being poured into AI data centres by the technology sector. Industry critics argue that lower-cost Chinese AI models could further undermine the economics of AI investment, although proponents argue this will only increase demand for the technology.
Britain’s grid capacity is also under scrutiny. On 29 July, Ofgem launched a consultation on data centre connection reforms, proposing a Data Centre Commitment Fee set between £237,500 and £712,500 per megawatt, refunded when a project reaches energisation and forfeited if it exits the connections queue early. Ofgem said demand connection applications had risen from 41 gigawatts to 125GW in under a year, with data centre projects accounting for at least 80GW. The consultation closes on 16 September.
Energy costs have already shaped where AI capacity lands. OpenAI paused its Stargate UK data centre project in April, citing British industrial energy prices and uncertainty over copyright rules, and said it would proceed once “the right conditions” allowed.
