Anthropic Partners with Trump-Linked RUM Group (RUM.US)! $13.7 Billion Computing Power Deal Raises Conflict-of-Interest Concerns

According to media reports citing people familiar with the matter, Anthropic has signed a six-year computing power contract worth $13.7 billion with RUM Group (RUM.US). RUM Group disclosed the $13.7 billion contract in a regulatory filing on the 23rd of last month, but did not disclose the counterparty at the time. Boosted by this news, as of press time, RUM Group surged more than 11% in Monday's U.S. pre-market session. The most notable aspect of this deal is that Anthropic obtained options to purchase up to 51 million shares of RUM Group at a price of 1 cent per share. Based on RUM Group's closing price of $7.17 on September 11, if fully exercised, Anthropic could realize a paper gain of more than $360 million at current prices. However, the scale of the exercise is tied to the scale of computing power Anthropic actually purchases from RUM Group. The contract with Rum Group is the latest in a series of computing power agreements Anthropic has signed over the past year. As demand for two products, Claude Code and Cowork, has exploded, competition for computing power resources needed for AI model training and inference has also intensified, and Anthropic has signed multiple large cloud computing procurement deals over the past year. Its partners include large cloud providers such as Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOGL.US), as well as computing power service providers such as SpaceX (SPCX.US) and Nscale. All of the above agreements together can provide at least 14.8 gigawatts of computing power, with estimated costs over the next decade reaching as high as $517 billion. Rum Group, formerly known as Rumble, operates the video-sharing platform Rumble, which is widely popular among conservatives, and Trump's Truth Social social platform is also hosted on the platform. Its early investors include Peter Thiel, the earliest and most steadfast Silicon Valley heavyweight supporter of Trump, and U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance. In June of this year, the company acquired German neocloud service provider Northern Data for about $767 million, formally entering the AI cloud business. Through this acquisition, the company obtained approximately 22,000 NVIDIA Corporation Hopper architecture GPUsH100 and H200as well as a data center site in Georgia, and subsequently changed its name to Rum Group. Anthropic plans to lease computing power from Rum Group's data center currently under construction in Maysville, Georgia. However, the facility's grid interconnection capacity is only 120 megawatts, and the completion timetable remains uncertain. In last month's filing, Rum Group said it has not yet secured the funds needed for data center construction and equipment procurement, and plans to cover costs through additional debt and equity financing. Anthropic's signing of a computing power contract with Trump-affiliated Rum Group has raised concerns about conflicts of interest. Investment information media TradingKey analysis believes that cooperation with Rum Group may increase volatility in Anthropic's valuation during its initial public offering (IPO) process. If this arrangement attracts scrutiny over conflicts of interest or procurement regulation, it could trigger investor concerns. However, another very different interpretation holds that friendly relations with the Trump administration may actually help Anthropic win large government and defense contracts in the future. As AI companies actively compete for cloud and AI infrastructure projects from the U.S. federal government and the Department of Defense, political connections may business opportunities.