Volta Exits Stealth at $2.4 Billion Valuation to Build AI Infrastructure

Volta emerged from stealth, saying it is focused on helping frontier artificial intelligence labs, AI-native companies and enterprises access dedicated AI infrastructure.

The company’s fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform brings together institutional infrastructure capital, powered land, data centers, compute, software and operations. With this platform, Volta develops, finances, builds and operates AI factories, it said in a Tuesday (Aug. 4) press release.

Volta completed a seed round and a Series A that value the company at $2.4 billion, according to the release.

The company also formed a partnership with an AI lab to develop an AI factory in Norway, per the release. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that the unnamed AI lab with which Volta struck the $10 billion deal is Anthropic. The six-year deal will see Anthropic use a data center managed by Volta, according to the report.

Volta also has a broader development pipeline that exceeds 1 gigawatt of near-term power capacity across North America and Europe, and the company has established an AI Infrastructure Program with asset manager Azora to provide $5 billion of financing for AI factories, per the release.

Volta Co-Founder and CEO Ricard Boada said in the release that compute has become a new infrastructure asset class and that Volta aims to make compute reliable and transparently priced.

“We founded Volta because compute should be financed, developed and commercialized with the principles and scale of infrastructure,” Boada said.

Volta Co-Founder and Chief Corporate Development Officer Sofia Gumuzio said in the release that meeting the demand for compute “requires a platform that can mobilize infrastructure capital, secure power and execute at industrial scale while moving at the pace of AI innovation. That’s what Volta was built to do.”

Volta’s Series A round was co-led by Azora, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter and Nvidia, according to the release.

Andreessen Horowitz said in a Tuesday post on LinkedIn that Volta makes compute accessible to startups by assembling the credit support, project equity and debt behind each deployment.

“We’re excited to partner with Ricard Boada, Sofia Gumuzio and the Volta team as they expand access to AI infrastructure and ensure startups can compete alongside the industry’s largest players,” Andreessen Horowitz said in the post.

It was reported in July that the five companies spending the most on AI data centers in the United States doubled their debt load over the past five years to finance their efforts. In total, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle added about $350 billion to their debt obligations.