A new company wants to be the one that pays for everyone else’s AI chips. Volta Infra Holdings has raised $300m in venture funding and lined up a further $5bn in financing to help a broader range of tech firms afford Nvidia’s costly hardware, in a round that values it at $2.4bn.
The raise was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter Capital, with Nvidia and Michael Dell also taking part.
Volta’s pitch is a financing problem dressed as a cloud company. Its founders argue that only the biggest firms with the strongest balance sheets can afford the upfront cost of cutting-edge chips, and Volta wants to spread that cost so smaller labs can compete.
The model places Volta among the neoclouds, the wave of GPU-focused providers renting out AI compute, though its emphasis is as much on the money as the machines. A $5bn financing pool, arranged by the asset manager Azora from a mix of banks, is meant to bankroll its customers.
The company was founded this year by Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio, both former executives in Brookfield’s infrastructure business.
