Nscale Nears a Second Anthropic Deal Worth About $45 Billion: 460MW of Vera Rubin Compute in West Virginia

Nscale, the Nvidia-backed AI cloud operator, is in talks to sell Anthropic a second tranche of computing capacity in a deal that could be worth about 45 billion dollars, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. The negotiations could be finalized in the coming days, the people said, though details could still change and no final decision has been made. Neither company commented.

Under the plan, Nscale would build a second facility at its Monarch data center campus in West Virginia, delivering about 460 megawatts of compute powered by Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips. Anthropic would also receive a right of first refusal on a third facility at the campus, which per Nscale's IPO filing can expand to more than 8 gigawatts of total power capacity at full build-out.

It would be the second mega-deal between the two. According to the regulatory filing tied to Nscale's planned IPO, Anthropic previously signed an infrastructure agreement with the company worth up to about 44.6 billion dollars. The new contract would roughly double that commitment and cement Anthropic as the startup's anchor customer.

The stakes extend to Nscale's own market debut. The company is seeking a valuation of roughly 30 billion dollars in its IPO, and earlier Bloomberg reporting indicated a group of investors had pushed the company to lower that target. Landing another nine-figure-multiple compute contract with one of the world's most valuable AI labs would strengthen the pitch considerably, effectively converting future customer demand into a valuation argument.

For Anthropic, the deal fits a buying pattern that has become one of the defining features of this phase of the AI build-out. Bloomberg has previously reported commitments of about 50 billion dollars with Fluidstack, roughly 10 billion with Volta Infrastructure Holdings, and about 45 billion with SpaceX, as the Claude maker races to secure enough accelerators for training and serving frontier models. The reported Nscale talks suggest the company sees no ceiling yet on how much compute it can absorb.

The numbers also illustrate how circular the infrastructure boom has become: chipmakers invest in the clouds that buy their chips, labs sign multi-decade-looking commitments against facilities that do not yet exist, and valuations compound on the back of each other's contracts. All of the figures here come from unnamed sources and a filing, not from either company, and the story is explicit that nothing is final.

If it closes, the deal would put a single customer's name on roughly 90 billion dollars of future spending at a company that was a relative unknown in the data center world two years ago, and would make the Monarch campus, currently rising in the Appalachian hills of West Virginia, one of the most consequential pieces of real estate in the AI economy.