Lambda, an AI data center provider, on Tuesday announced it raised $1.5 billion in a round led by TWG Global, a relatively new $40 billion investment firm formed by billionaires Thomas Tull, the former owner of Legendary Entertainment, and Guggenheim Partners founder and CEO Mark Walter.TWG manages a variety of the billionaires’ assets, including Walter’s stakes in the Los Angeles Lakers and the new Cadillac F1 racing team. Anchored by Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala, the firm also has a $15 billion fund to invest in AI. TWG earlier invested in a partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI and Palantir to sell AI agents to businesses.Now the firm is backing Lambda, which serves several U.S. AI data centers. Lambda is a CoreWeave competitor, although it also markets its “AI factories” to hyperscaler clouds. Lambda recently announced a multibillion-dollar agreement with Microsoft. This deal involves supplying Microsoft with AI infrastructure, leveraging tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs. Notably, Nvidia is also an investor in Lambda.It is pertinent to mention that Microsoft had a comparable deal with CoreWeave and bought about $1 billion worth of services from the company in 2024, making it its largest customer last year by far. Then, in March, OpenAI signed a $12 billion agreement with CoreWeave.For months, industry observers have speculated about Lambda’s financing plans, suggesting the company was seeking to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, which would push its valuation past $4 billion. Talk of an Initial Public Offering (IPO) was also circulating. This follows Lambda’s $480 million Series D funding round in February, which PitchBook estimated valued the company at $2.5 billion.Lambda’s recent $1.5 billion fundraising significantly surpasses its previously reported targets. The company declined to comment, so it is unconfirmed whether its valuation has also increased dramatically.