Nscale is in talks to sell Anthropic about $45 billion of computing power for a second facility at its Monarch data centre campus in West Virginia, according to Bloomberg News, in what would be the second giant deal between the UK-based AI cloud firm and the Claude maker. The talks are ongoing, no final decision has been made, and a deal could be finalised within days, people familiar with the negotiations said. Representatives of Anthropic and Nscale declined to comment.
A Second 460 Megawatts At Monarch
The proposed facility would deliver 460 megawatts of computing power built around Nvidia’s Vera Rubin AI chips. Anthropic also holds a right of first refusal on an expected third building at the campus, according to the report. The two companies are already bound together at unusual scale: Anthropic has agreements in place with Nscale for infrastructure worth as much as about $44.6 billion, according to the regulatory filing for Nscale’s planned IPO. That first contract, signed in August, covers about 460 megawatts at the same West Virginia site over six years, with the facility expected to come online at the end of 2027.
Monarch is built to grow far beyond this deal. The campus is scalable to more than eight gigawatts of gross power when complete, and phase one alone plans three facilities totalling 1.37 gigawatts, targeted for the first half of 2028. The opening for Anthropic widened when Microsoft, which had been slated to anchor part of the campus, pulled out after power-connection delays pushed its expected supply date into the 2030s — the same grid problem that ended Microsoft’s anchor deal at Nscale’s Loughton site near London, which GEroundtable covered earlier this week. Anthropic’s appetite fits the picture its own draft IPO filing paints: as GEroundtable reported today, the company has already committed hundreds of billions of dollars to future computing capacity.
Nscale’s IPO Is Riding On These Deals
For Nscale, the talks land in the middle of its own run at the public markets. The company is seeking a valuation of about $30 billion in its market debut, although a cohort of investors has urged it to lower that target as scrutiny sharpens over debt-driven AI infrastructure expansion — rival CoreWeave’s shares slumped last week amid concerns over its $50 billion debt load. Another multibillion-dollar Anthropic deal would strengthen Nscale’s case: the company has grown its total contracted value from $100 million to more than $103 billion in two and a half years.
The filing also shows how concentrated that book is. Microsoft and Anthropic together are expected to account for about 85% of Nscale’s $103 billion in total contract value, and Nscale has not yet secured financing for the first Anthropic facility, let alone the chips a second one would need. Anthropic, meanwhile, has become one of the data centre industry’s defining customers, with reported deals including a $50 billion pact with Fluidstack, $10 billion with Volta Infrastructure and $45 billion with Elon Musk’s SpaceX — a demand wave that is pulling suppliers like Nvidia’s chip ecosystem along with it, from industrial AI campuses in Germany to West Virginia.
Why It Matters
This negotiation is the AI infrastructure boom in miniature: a two-and-a-half-year-old cloud company whose entire valuation rests on contracts with two customers, talking to the larger of them about doubling a $45 billion commitment at a single campus — before the first facility is financed or built. If the deal signs, it locks Anthropic into Nscale’s Vera Rubin capacity for years and hands Nscale the anchor contract its IPO story needs. If it slips, both stories wobble: Anthropic still has to find the power its IPO filing promises, and Nscale goes to market with a thinner book. Either way, the number that matters is not the $45 billion headline but the concentration underneath it — one buyer, one campus, one chip generation.
Background
Nscale is a UK-based AI cloud company backed by Nvidia, which joined its $2 billion funding round in March 2026. It develops and operates data centres for AI workloads and competes with neocloud providers such as Nebius, Crusoe and Lambda. Anthropic, the San Francisco company behind the Claude models, has emerged as one of the industry’s biggest buyers of computing capacity as it scales Claude and prepares its own IPO, and it struck its first $45 billion agreement to rent AI computing power from Nscale’s West Virginia campus in August 2026.
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