Qualcomm's $60 Billion Amazon Chip Deal Pushes the AI Ledger to $975B

TL;DR

• Qualcomm just bought its way into the AI data-center chip market. A September 8 8-K discloses a warrant letting Amazon earn up to 25 million Qualcomm shares as it buys Qualcomm's custom AI inference chips, networking gear and manufacturing services, vesting in full once Amazon's purchases from Qualcomm reach a $60 billion ceiling. It is the ledger's first Qualcomm row and the first non-Nvidia, non-AMD chipmaker on the sheet.
• Two rows close a gap from the AMD-Anthropic partnership announced in July: a 2 gigawatt chip-deployment row and a companion up-to-$5 billion equity row, both missing from the dataset until now.
• The Volta-Anthropic Norway deal moves from candidate to binding row now that Volta's own launch press release stands as a primary source for the $10 billion, six-year, 133 MW terms.
• Anthropic's reported $45 billion Nscale lease stays out of the binding total. Bloomberg, CNBC and Reuters have all reported it, and Nscale has since filed for a US stock listing that press coverage links to this lease. I couldn't read a company filing that names Anthropic or states the terms directly, so the row stays reported, not binding.
• Running totals: $975.1 billion binding on 15.81 GW, up from $900.1 billion and 13.68 GW.

The Board

A chipmaker most people associate with phones just signed one of the ledger's largest new-entrant deals.

Qualcomm Buys Its Way Into the AI Chip Race

Qualcomm makes the chip inside most Android phones. It does not, until this deal, make chips for AI data centers. That changed on September 8, when Qualcomm filed an 8-K disclosing a warrant it issued to an Amazon investment subsidiary: up to 25 million Qualcomm shares at $161.26 each, expiring in 2036.

Qualcomm's own press release describes what the warrant is actually paying for: a multi-generational collaboration to build custom AI inference silicon for AWS, plus joint work on optical networking running at 1.6 terabits per second and beyond. The warrant pays for that collaboration in stock instead of cash. It vests in tranches as Amazon places binding purchase orders and actually buys Qualcomm's server chip products, technology, systems and manufacturing services, and it vests in full once those purchases reach a $60 billion ceiling. 3.75 million shares vested immediately, tied to an initial purchase commitment Qualcomm did not size.

$60 billion is a ceiling, not a floor. It is the number that fully vests the warrant, and Amazon has not promised to spend it. The ledger's row carries an up_to qualifier for exactly that reason. Amazon's own investment in Anthropic, and Microsoft and Nvidia's combined stake in Anthropic, get the same treatment.

Several outlets separately valued the warrant itself, as a block of stock, at roughly $4 billion at issuance. That is the value of the shares Qualcomm handed over. It is not the dollar figure Amazon is committing to spend, and it is not the number this row carries. Qualcomm said it already has production revenue coming in its December quarter. That is the one piece of this deal that reads as a near-term commitment rather than a long-run ceiling.

Two Rows From a Deal Everyone Already Knew About

AMD and Anthropic announced their partnership on July 22, and it was covered everywhere. AMD agreed to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450-series GPUs in its Helios rack-scale systems, with the first gigawatt online in the first half of 2027. AMD also committed to a strategic equity investment of up to $5 billion in Anthropic. Neither side of that deal had a row in the ledger before this update.

The two pieces become two separate ledger rows, because one prices a chip purchase and the other prices an investment. amd-anthropic-gpu-deployment-2026-07 carries the 2,000 MW capacity figure with no dollar value, since neither company priced the chip purchase itself. amd-anthropic-equity-2026-07 carries the up-to-$5 billion investment. Both rows are flagged circular: the chip supplier is also becoming an investor in its own customer, the same pattern already on the ledger for Nvidia and OpenAI.

Why the Volta Deal Just Moved From Candidate to Binding

Bloomberg reported on August 4 that Volta Infra's mystery AI-lab customer in Norway was Anthropic, under a six-year, roughly $10 billion agreement. The ledger held it in the candidate queue for weeks, because Bloomberg's report was the only source for the customer's identity and neither company had confirmed it.

Anthropic and Volta still haven't confirmed the deal. What changed is that Volta's own stealth-exit press release, dated the same day as Bloomberg's report, discloses the $10 billion, six-year figure and the 133 MW Nvidia Vera Rubin deployment itself. It names only an unidentified AI lab as the customer, but it is still a primary source for the deal's terms, even without a named counterparty. It is the exact pattern already established for the Riot-Anthropic Rockdale lease: Riot's own filing named an unidentified frontier AI lab, and Bloomberg identified it as Anthropic the next day. That row went in as binding, with the identification carried as a flag rather than an open blocker. The Volta row now gets the same treatment, promoted out of candidates.json and into volta-anthropic-tydal-compute-2026-08.

Nscale's $45 Billion Anthropic Lease Stays Unconfirmed

Anthropic's reported $45 billion, six-year lease at Nscale's Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia does not get the same promotion. Bloomberg broke it on August 26, CNBC confirmed the same day, and Reuters picked it up soon after. That clears the ledger's inclusion bar for a reported deal. Nscale has since filed to list on the NYSE under the ticker NSCL. Several outlets covering that filing describe a contracted-revenue backlog of roughly $100 billion anchored by this lease. I could not locate and read the registration statement itself to confirm it names Anthropic or states the lease terms. So that filing does not count as the primary confirmation the ledger needs.

A reported row sits in the table and counts nowhere in the headline binding total. That is the same treatment already given SpaceX's larger Colossus commitments before company confirmation caught up to the reporting. If Nscale's registration statement puts a number on this lease once it can be read directly, the row flips to binding the same day. Until then it stays in the $180 billion non-binding column, next to the letters of intent and the talks-stage backstops that headlines routinely fold into signed-contract totals.

Two Candidates Still Blocked on No Dollar Figure

CoreWeave and Hudson River Trading signed a "multibillion-dollar" cloud deal that CoreWeave's own CRO declined to size, so it has no entry on the ledger. Amazon and Nvidia expanded their GPU order by 2 million chips, worth "tens of billions" per unnamed estimates neither company has confirmed, so it stays out for the same reason: no company-stated dollar value.

The One-Line Read

A phone-chip company just signed one of AI infrastructure's largest new-entrant chip deals, and the ledger's binding total crosses $975 billion on four rows for deals that had already been public for weeks but had no entry here until now.

Sources: Qualcomm's September 8 Form 8-K and its own press release, AMD's and Volta's launch press releases, and Bloomberg, CNBC and Reuters reporting on the Nscale lease, cross-checked against each company's own disclosures where they exist. Every figure links to its row in the full ledger, browsable per company on pages like Qualcomm's entity record, AMD's entity record and Anthropic's entity record. The full methodology, including every open candidate, is on the methodology page.