Lambda to Raise $4B at $14.5B Valuation Ahead of 2027 IPO

AI cloud provider Lambda is raising up to $4 billion at a $14.5 billion pre-money valuation, in what may be the company's final private round before a planned 2027 IPO. Blackstone and Coatue Management are leading the round, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the deal.

The Nvidia-backed startup sells GPU computing capacity to companies training and running AI models. The raise shows investors are still willing to fund AI infrastructure at large scale, even as the cost of building data centers keeps climbing and lenders grow more selective about who they finance.

A letter to investors reviewed by the Journal shows Lambda's backlog grew from $15 billion in June to $50 billion in September. Most of that increase appears to come from a single $35 billion commitment by Anthropic, which signed a deal with Lambda in late August.

That concentration matters. Lambda's valuation now leans heavily on Anthropic's ability to keep paying, TechCrunch notes, even as reliable GPU capacity remains scarce and demand for it stays strong.

For neoclouds like Lambda, demand is not the problem, the cost of meeting it is. Data center buildouts are mostly funded by debt, and Lambda raised an additional $1 billion last week alone, according to TechCrunch.

Raising now gives Lambda more capital before the scrutiny of public markets arrives and helps set the tone for its IPO pricing. The company had reportedly planned to debut this year but pushed the date back amid market uncertainty.

Lambda is not alone in this race. Nvidia-backed neoclouds CoreWeave and Nebius now depend on the health of their stocks to fund their buildouts, while British neocloud Nscale filed for an IPO last month and is expected to begin trading soon.

Separately, Chinese AI startup Deepseek is close to raising at least $12 billion in a new round, with CATL and Tencent contributing the largest shares, Bloomberg reports. Deepseek also plans to restructure for an IPO in early 2027.