Azora se alía con Nvidia para crear Volta, gigante de IA valorado en 2.400 millones

A Madrid-based investment firm has quietly positioned itself at the center of artificial intelligence's infrastructure boom. Azora, which manages roughly 17 billion euros in assets and has spent two decades building data centers and electrical grids across Europe and the United States, launched a new company called Volta in late 2025 with a deceptively simple mission: own the graphics processors that power the world's most advanced AI systems.

Volta does not build chips. It buys them—specifically, Nvidia's latest generation processors—installs them in data centers, and rents the computing capacity to the laboratories developing frontier AI models. Anthropic and OpenAI are among its first customers. The company's name honors Alessandro Volta, the physicist who invented the electric battery, a fitting choice for a firm betting that artificial intelligence is fundamentally an infrastructure problem, not a software one.

The bet has attracted serious capital. In a funding round that closed recently, Volta raised 300 million dollars and reached a valuation of 2.4 billion dollars. Nvidia itself invested alongside Michael Dell's family office and two prominent venture firms, Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter, both of which backed Airbnb, Pinterest, SpaceX, and Uber in their early days. Azora and Volta's two founders—Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio, both former executives at Brookfield—remain the company's largest shareholders.

The proof of concept arrived almost immediately. Volta has signed its first major contract to deploy 133 megawatts of graphics processors in a Norwegian data center, equipped with Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin systems. The project will supply computing power to Anthropic under a long-term agreement and requires an investment of 5 billion dollars in chips alone. Financing is already secured. The deal is expected to generate 10 billion dollars in future revenue.

What makes this structure compelling is that it treats computing as what infrastructure investors have long understood: essential assets with stable, predictable cash flows. A company building its own AI models faces unpredictable demand and technical obsolescence. A company owning the processors that every AI lab must rent has something closer to a utility business. Santiago Olivares, the Azora partner overseeing infrastructure investments, describes it plainly: when graphics processors are locked into long-term contracts with top-tier customers, they possess the characteristics any infrastructure investor seeks—essential assets, high demand, and reliable revenue streams.

Volta is not Azora's first move into the digital infrastructure space. The firm previously launched Quetta, which operates smaller, proximity-focused data centers, and Tillion, which builds massive facilities for technology giants like Google and Amazon. But Volta represents something different: direct ownership of the computational assets themselves rather than just the real estate that houses them. By controlling the full chain—from the physical buildings to the electrical systems to the processors themselves—Azora has constructed an integrated model that captures value at every layer of AI infrastructure.

For a traditional real estate and infrastructure investor, the pivot is significant. Azora is no longer simply landlord to the digital economy. It is now a direct participant in the machinery of artificial intelligence, sitting on Volta's board alongside Nvidia and some of the world's most influential venture capitalists. The company has assembled roughly 150 employees across London and Palo Alto, many recruited from Google and other technology firms. In less than a year, it has moved from concept to a billion-dollar-plus enterprise with a signed contract that will define its trajectory for years to come.