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Cloud provider Lambda is raising up to $4 billion at a $14.5 billion pre-money valuation, marking what could be its last private round before a planned 2027 IPO, according to The Wall Street Journal. Coatue Management and Blackstone are leading the round. A letter to investors reviewed by the Journal shows Lambda’s backlog grew from $15 billion in June to $50 billion in September. While that might look like a hearty increase in demand, much of that increase appears to be driven by a $35 billion commitment from one company: Anthropic, which signed a deal with Lambda in late August. That means Lambda’s valuation, which has climbed significantly since its 2025 funding round, could be leaning heavily on Anthropic’s ability to keep paying. Still, with reliable GPU capacity so scarce, investors are clearly still willing to bet on companies that provide it, especially ones with large contracts with a major AI lab. For neoclouds like Lambda, demand isn’t so much the problem as is the cost of meeting it. Data center buildouts are largely funded by debt — of which Lambda just raised an additional $1 billion last week — and lenders are getting choosier about who they offer cash to and under what circumstances. Lambda’s decision to raise more now not only sets the tone for its IPO pricing, but also gives it access to more capital before the scrutiny of public markets arrives. If and when Lambda does IPO — the company was reportedly meant to debut this year, but has pushed that back amid market uncertainty — it will join other Nvidia-backed neoclouds, like CoreWeave and Nebius, that now depend on the health of their stock to fund their data center buildouts. British neocloud Nscale filed for an IPO last month and is expected to begin trading soon. Lambda, Coatue, and Blackstone did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
document fetched 2026-10-12 18:03 · canonical https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/06/ai-computing-startup-lambda-to-raise-4b-ahead-of-planned-ipo