AI News
Anthropic in Talks for a Second $45 Billion Compute Deal With Nscale
Nscale, a British data center company backed by Nvidia, is in talks to sell computing power to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth about $45 billion, Bloomberg News reported on October 19, citing people familiar with the negotiations. If completed, it would be the second agreement of that size between the two companies in less than three months. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models, would take a second facility at Nscale's Monarch data center campus in West Virginia, roughly doubling its planned footprint at the site.
What is being negotiated
The proposed deal covers a second building at the Monarch campus. According to the reports, that building would deliver about 460 megawatts of computing capacity, built on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin AI chips. Anthropic would rent the computing power rather than own the site: Nscale builds and operates the facility, and Anthropic pays for capacity as it comes online.
Anthropic also holds a right of first refusal on a third building planned at Monarch, according to the reports. Discussions are still ongoing, and the details could change before anything is signed. Neither company has confirmed the talks; both Anthropic and Nscale did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters, which noted it could not independently verify Bloomberg's report.
The first deal, signed in August
The new talks follow a similar agreement reached in August, under which Anthropic agreed to spend about $45 billion renting AI cloud computing power from Nscale's West Virginia campus. According to details from Nscale's IPO filing, the first contract was signed on August 25 and is worth up to $44.6 billion. It also covers roughly 460 megawatts of Vera Rubin capacity at Monarch, under a six-year arrangement, with delivery expected to begin in late 2027.
Together, the two agreements would give Anthropic close to a gigawatt of planned capacity at a single campus whose first phase is designed for more than 1.3 gigawatts across three buildings. One condition in the first deal matters, however: Nscale's filing said binding financing for the Anthropic capacity had not yet been secured, and the contract allows Anthropic to terminate the agreement if that financing is not in place by a set deadline.
Why Anthropic keeps buying compute
Training and running frontier AI models requires computing power on a scale that few suppliers can provide. Anthropic has spent the past year signing large, long-term contracts to lock in capacity before it is built, rather than compete for it later. The Nscale agreements follow that pattern, alongside other large deals the company has struck with providers including Fluidstack, Volta Infrastructure and SpaceX.
For Nscale, Anthropic is one of two anchor customers. The company says its total contracted value has grown from $100 million to more than $103 billion in two and a half years, competing with firms such as Nebius, Crusoe and Lambda. Its IPO prospectus names Anthropic and Microsoft as its expected major customers. A second Anthropic deal would strengthen Nscale's position as it prepares its own stock market listing in New York.
A sensitive moment for both companies
The talks arrive under close investor scrutiny. Bloomberg reported that some investors have urged Anthropic to lower the valuation target for its planned IPO, after a series of market setbacks for AI companies. Last week, shares in CoreWeave, an Nscale rival, fell sharply on concerns about its $50 billion debt load, feeding a wider sell-off in AI stocks. Investors are pressing harder on companies expanding data center capacity with borrowed money.
Nscale has also felt the execution risk directly. Microsoft recently pulled out of a deal to anchor a flagship Nscale data center in the United Kingdom after power connection delays pushed the expected supply date into the 2030s. Large compute contracts depend on grid connections, construction schedules and chip deliveries arriving on time; a signature alone does not produce a working data center.
The takeaway
If completed, the second Monarch deal would take Anthropic's commitments at the campus to roughly $90 billion and underline how far the contest between AI labs has moved from software to infrastructure. The leading model makers now compete on power contracts and construction timelines as much as on research. For now, though, this remains a negotiation: the terms are not final, neither company has confirmed them, and the first deal itself still depends on financing that has not yet been secured.