Lambda

In 2012, the machine learning engineers and brothers Stephen Balaban and Michael Balaban founded Lambda in San Francisco; the company’s first “office” was Noisebridge, a hackerspace in the Mission District. The company describes itself as an AI-only company, with all of its engineering, operations, and support teams dedicated to AI workloads and infrastructure.⁠[1][2][3][3]

In March 2015, Michael Balaban joined full time. As he recalled, the brothers built a website and iPhone app based on a paper on neural network artistic style transfer that could turn selfies into the style of famous paintings; after they posted it on Reddit, it took off quickly, at one point drawing about 30,000 sign-ups a day. Demand for computing power soared, their Amazon Web Services (AWS) bill reached $40,000 a month, and the company projected that it would run out of money within two to three months. They switched to building their own servers, about $60,000 worth of equipment that paid for itself in a month and a half, and placed the servers in a friend’s house, after which their AWS bill dropped by 95%.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

From late 2016 into early 2017, the two found that many teams working on AI were similarly burdened by the high cost of cloud computing, so they began selling their own AI servers online, including on Amazon’s online store, and concluded that this was a better business than their original app. The company began selling AI infrastructure in 2017, when its customers were mainly academic researchers working on image recognition, speech generation, and natural language processing; its products included the Lambda Quad GPU workstation, followed by the Lambda Blade GPU server launched in 2017.⁠[2][2][4][4][2]

In 2017, the company received an investment of undisclosed size from Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI venture capital arm; Stephen Balaban said in 2020 that the company had been profitable ever since.⁠[2][2]

In 2018, the company formally launched Lambda GPU Cloud, and the same year it released Lambda Stack, a deep learning software package bundling frameworks such as TensorFlow, Keras, and Caffe along with Nvidia CUDA drivers. By the end of 2020, the company, then named Lambda Labs, had about 30 employees, and its customers included Apple, MIT, Amazon Research, Tencent, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the US Department of Defense.⁠[2][2][2][2]

On July 21, 2021, Lambda announced that it had raised $24.5 million, consisting of a $15 million Series A equity round and a $9.5 million debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank; Series A investors included 1517, Gradient Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Razer, and Georges Harik, all of them existing investors except the gaming hardware company Razer, which participated as a strategic investor. The funds were to be used to expand its cloud and software engineering teams, pay for fixed assets for its cloud business, and serve as working capital for its deep learning hardware business.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5]

On March 21, 2023, Lambda announced a $44 million Series B led by Mercato Partners, with participation from individuals including Adam D’Angelo, Jeff Hammerbacher, Greg Brockman, Lukas Biewald, and Garry Tan; Mercato Managing Director Ryan Sanders joined the board. The funds were to be used to deploy H100 GPUs with high-speed network interconnects and make the company’s cloud a dedicated platform for training AI.⁠[6][6][6][6][6]

On February 15, 2024, Lambda announced a $320 million Series C led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), with new investors including B Capital, SK Telecom, and T. Rowe Price Associates, raising the company’s valuation to $1.5 billion. The funds were to be used to expand its GPU cloud, offering thousands of Nvidia GPUs with high-speed Nvidia Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking. At the time, its private cloud business served more than 5,000 customers, and the company also sold GPU desktops and the Tensorbook laptop for AI engineers.⁠[4][7][7][4][7][7]

On February 19, 2025, Lambda announced a $480 million Series D co-led by Andra Capital and SGW, with new investors including Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, In-Q-Tel, and Nvidia, and strategic investment from Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, and Wiwynn. The funds were to be used to expand the infrastructure and software of its cloud platform and to continue developing Lambda Chat, which hosts open source models such as DeepSeek-R1. At the time, its GPU cloud operated out of colocation data centers in San Francisco and Allen, Texas, and the company also helped enterprises deploy Nvidia servers in their own data centers.⁠[8][8][8][8][9][9]

On November 3, 2025, Lambda announced a multibillion-dollar, multi-year agreement with Microsoft to deploy AI infrastructure for it powered by tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, including GB300 NVL72 systems. Then-CEO Stephen Balaban said the two companies had been working together for more than eight years.⁠[10][10][10]

On November 18, 2025, Lambda announced a Series E of more than $1.5 billion led by TWG GlobalTWG GlobalTWG Global is a holding company led by Mark Walter and Thomas Tull that operates and invests in businesses across financial services, insurance, AI and technology, sports, media and entertainment, and energy; in November 2025, it led the AI cloud infrastructure company Lambda’s Series E funding round of over $1.5 billion.Open the full entry, the holding company led by Thomas Tull and Mark Walter, with participation from Tull’s USIT and several existing investors; the funds were to be used to build gigawatt-scale AI factories and supercomputers. The company did not disclose the valuation for the round; in October 2026, media reports on Lambda’s new funding round said the November 2025 round had given Lambda a post-money valuation of $5.9 billion (a figure reported by the media).⁠[11][11][11][12]

On February 19, 2026, Lambda appointed Charles Fisher, former CFO of Turo and a senior finance executive at Charter Communications, as CFO, responsible for capital strategy and financial operations.⁠[13][1]

On May 5, 2026, Lambda announced a leadership reorganization: co-founder Stephen Balaban stepped down as CEO to become CTO, focusing full time on technology strategy and product vision; Michel Combes, chairman and CEO of Brightspeed, became CEO effective May 2026, having previously served as CEO of SoftBank International, Sprint, and Alcatel-Lucent; John Donovan, former CEO of AT&T Communications, became chairman; and the other co-founder, Michael Balaban, moved into the newly created role of Chief Product Officer.⁠[1][1][1][1][14][12]

The company said the appointments were part of a planned leadership build following its Series E in November 2025, which had already included the appointments of Jerry Hunter, former COO of Snap, as Vice Chairman of Compute Delivery, and David Connolly, former General Counsel at Altice, as Chief Legal Officer; the team’s goal is to have 3 gigawatts of AI compute under management by 2030.⁠[1][1][1][1]

On May 7, 2026, Lambda closed a $1 billion syndicated senior secured credit facility, upsized nearly fourfold from a $275 million facility established in August 2025, with J.P. Morgan as lead arranger; the funds were to be used to expand its fleet of next-generation Nvidia AI accelerator servers and its data center capacity.⁠[15][15][15][15]

In late August 2026, Lambda was reported to be in talks to raise up to $3 billion in pre-IPO funding at a valuation of $12 billion or more, in preparation for a listing expected the following year; terms had not been finalized, and the company did not comment publicly.⁠[16][16][16][16]

On August 27, 2026, Lambda closed a $926 million senior secured term loan B (priced on August 12) to purchase GPUs for a committed deployment with an investment-grade customer. The loan received a Baa2 rating from Moody’s, was priced at SOFR plus 3.00%, was issued at 99.5% of principal, matures on December 31, 2030, and is secured by the GPU servers purchased and their cash flows, with Morgan StanleyMorgan StanleyMorgan Stanley is an American global financial services firm that grew from an investment banking partnership into a publicly traded financial group spanning investment banking, securities trading, wealth management, and investment management.Open the full entry as lead left arranger; the company said it was the first broadly syndicated, investment-grade-rated term loan B by a private neocloud.⁠[17][17][17][17][17][17][17]

In early September 2026, people familiar with the matter said AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry had reached a cloud computing deal worth about $35 billion with Lambda involving a data center being developed by Hut 8 in Nueces County, Texas, with the contract covering the lease of Nvidia hardware hosted at Hut 8’s Texas facility; none of the parties commented publicly.⁠[18][18][18][12]

On October 1, 2026, Lambda closed a $1.008 billion investment-grade delayed draw term loan marketed to insurance companies and fixed income investors, its first US fixed-rate financing. The loan carries a fixed interest rate of 6.78%, received an A (low) rating from Morningstar DBRS and a Baa1 rating from Moody’s, matures on May 30, 2033, and will fund the purchase and construction of GPU infrastructure for three committed deployments with two investment-grade customers, with J.P. Morgan as sole coordinating lead arranger.⁠[19][19][19][19][19][19][19][19]

On October 6, 2026, people familiar with the matter said Lambda was raising up to $4 billion at a pre-money valuation of $14.5 billion, in what could be its final funding round before a planned initial public offering, led by Blackstone and Coatue ManagementCoatueCoatue is a technology- and innovation-focused investment management firm founded by Philippe Laffont in 1999, operating in both public and private markets. Its current website lists Thomas Laffont as co-founder and chief investment officer of private investments; a Form ADV filed on July 29, 2026, disclosed regulatory assets under management of $92,705,722,582.Open the full entry. A letter from the company to its limited partners showed that it aimed to go public in 2027, depending on execution and market conditions, and that its order backlog had grown from $15 billion in June to $50 billion in September; Lambda declined to comment on the details of the fundraising.⁠[12][20][20][20][20][12][12]

As of October 2026, Lambda described itself as “The Superintelligence Cloud,” building supercomputers for AI training and inference for tens of thousands of customers ranging from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers; its AI factories use modular power, liquid cooling, and high-bandwidth interconnects, scaling from distributed sites of 5 to 75 megawatts to campuses of more than 75 megawatts. The company is an Nvidia Exemplar Cloud partner, has been named Nvidia Partner of the Year seven times, and has raised more than $1.5 billion in equity in total. Its mission is “to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity,” and its slogan is “One person, one GPU.”⁠[1][1][13][13][13][1]

Lambda: Official website: https://lambda.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[21]

X: Public account: https://x.com/LambdaAPI (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lambda-cloud/ (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@lambda-ai (opens in a new window)⁠[21]