On 24 August, RUM Group filed an 8-K describing a six-year contract worth roughly $13.7 billion. The buyer appeared only as “an unaffiliated U.S.-based third party cloud customer.” Last night The Information supplied the name: Anthropic. Neither company had confirmed it as of Sunday evening.
RUM Group owns the video platform Rumble and the European AI cloud company Northern Data. What is being sold is access to GPUs at a site in Maysville, Georgia, which the filing describes as “currently under development.” The total splits into three tranches of about $4.57 billion each.
The catch in tranche three
The third tranche only binds once the customer has reviewed and approved RUM Group’s proposed delivery date. If RUM Group cannot hit a schedule the customer accepts, the commitment drops to roughly $9.1 billion. In other words, the buyer has an exit on a third of the contract.
RUM Group also says it does not yet have the financing to build Maysville and buy the GPUs. Its own obligations under the deal are not conditioned on raising that money.
The penny warrant
The stranger part is the warrant. The customer can buy up to 50,808,408 Class A shares at one cent each. That is about 18% of Class A shares outstanding in early August, worth roughly $364 million at Friday’s close.
It vests in two halves. The first in three steps of 16.67%, one with each tranche purchased. The second in five steps of 10%, but only if the two sides sign further expansion agreements. Full vesting would require expansion purchases of more than two and a half times the first three tranches — north of $34 billion.
Who owns RUM Group? Tether and co-founder Giancarlo Devasini reported holding 50.3% of the Class A shares in a 4 September filing. The Information ran the story under a headline calling RUM Group “Trump-linked.”
Why this one stuck with me
The timing. On Saturday Dario Amodei asked the industry to slow down, explicitly mentioning possible limits on training compute. A day later his company turns up in print as the buyer of six years of GPU capacity.
That is not a scandal. You can favour rules that apply to everyone and keep buying until they do — anything else is unilateral disarmament, which Amodei’s own essay warns against. The position just gets harder to hold the longer the list of contracts gets.
What interests me more is the structure. A data center that has not been built, financed by a company that does not have the money yet, backed by a warrant on nearly a fifth of its stock. If Maysville gets built, Anthropic has compute and a stake in its landlord. If it does not, Anthropic has an exit and RUM Group has a problem. The risk in this contract is not evenly spread.
Sources: