Reporting indicates that Anthropic is the unnamed customer behind a six-year, $13.7 billion computing contract that Rumble — now operating as Rum Group — disclosed in August without identifying its partner. Neither company has confirmed the pairing.
Rumble shares moved sharply on the news, though accounts of the move differ. One report put the stock up 27% at $1.99 on Monday, while another had it up roughly 10% to $7.87 in early trading, with an intraday high of $8.73 — its highest level since September 4. The discrepancy across reports has not been reconciled.
What the reported deal involves
Under the reported agreement, Anthropic would lease capacity at a data center under construction in Maysville, Georgia. Building and equipping that facility with server chips could cost more than $10 billion, according to the reporting.
The contract also reportedly gives Anthropic an option to buy up to 51 million Rum Group shares for $0.01 each. Half of those rights are tied to purchases at Maysville, with the remainder contingent on buying additional capacity at a separate site.
The delivery timetable remains unclear. Northern Data, the German cloud provider Rum Group acquired in June, previously indicated the Georgia location would be operational late this year.
The financing gap
An August securities filing showed the owner lacked financing for construction and GPU purchases at the time. It expected to cover much of the cost through additional debt or equity financing. That gap matters: a $13.7 billion headline contract sits on top of a buildout whose funding plan is not yet visible.
Rumble entered the AI infrastructure business earlier this year by acquiring Northern Data in an all-stock transaction, and it now runs its media platform alongside an AI infrastructure unit. It also provides cloud hosting for Truth Social, the platform operated by Trump Media & Technology Group.
Sector read-across
The reported award landed on a rough day for rented-compute peers. CoreWeave fell about 9% to $81.25 and Nebius dropped about 9% to $205.28, while the First Trust Cloud Computing ETF was down only 0.58% and the Invesco QQQ Trust fell 1.63% — suggesting the selling was concentrated in AI-compute names rather than cloud software broadly.
Sentiment across the group was already under pressure after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay over the weekend calling on frontier AI firms to slow the pace of model capability development, a call OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed.
Some secondary write-ups and aggregators have restated the pairing as a signed Anthropic deal. Neither Anthropic nor Rum Group / Rumble has publicly confirmed the customer identity.
Our take
The structure here is more interesting than the headline number. A six-year commitment with a penny-priced equity option ties the customer's incentives directly to Rumble's stock — unusual for a compute lease, and a sign of how frontier labs are locking up scarce capacity. But the contract's value rests on a data center that isn't built and isn't yet financed. Until either company confirms the pairing and a funding plan for Maysville appears, this is a single-source report moving a small-cap stock, not a closed deal.
