Anthropic, the developer of the Claude AI model, has agreed to spend $45 billion on renting computing capacity from British cloud provider Nscale. According to Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the terms of the private agreement, the contract spans six years and covers approximately 460 megawatts of capacity at Nscale's data center located in West Virginia. These resources will help Anthropic meet the training and inference demands of new versions of its flagship Claude model. To fulfill the agreement, Nscale will use Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin compute accelerators, with mass shipments expected in late 2027. The amount of electricity stipulated by the contract roughly equals the consumption of 345,000 American households.
The agreement with Nscale is the latest in a series of large-scale computing resource contracts for Anthropic amid rapidly growing demand for the company's products. The Claude developer has previously struck deals worth $50 billion with provider Fluidstack, $10 billion with Volta Infrastructure Holdings, and nearly $45 billion with space company SpaceX. The latter agreement provides Anthropic with up to 300 megawatts of computing capacity at the Colossus 1 facility in Memphis. Separately, the company announced a partnership with Google and Broadcom to develop computing infrastructure with capacity in the gigawatt range. Anthropic's strategy is aimed at securing scarce computing resources in advance, which are essential to maintaining competitiveness in the AI development race.
Anthropic's contract covers the first of three buildings in the Monarch campus that Nscale is developing in West Virginia. Once fully built out, the entire project will have a total capacity of approximately 1.35 gigawatts. Nscale estimates that constructing the campus and its own power plant will cost around $71 billion, of which roughly $47 billion will go toward purchasing specialized processors. Servers in the remaining buildings of the complex are expected to come online in 2028. Notably, Microsoft was originally set to be the tenant of this facility — the company signed a letter of intent with Nscale in March — but withdrew from the project in the summer, after which Anthropic took its place. Once operational, the complex is expected to directly create around 645 jobs, with an additional approximately 3,600 positions planned to be generated indirectly across the state. Around 4,375 workers will be engaged during the construction phase.
For Nscale, the deal is of strategic importance ahead of a potential public market debut. The company, which develops AI infrastructure as a non-cloud provider, plans to list in the United States as early as next month. According to Bloomberg, in preparation for the offering, Nscale told potential investors it had approximately $51 billion in contracted revenue ahead of the IPO. Large long-term agreements with leading AI developers serve as a key valuation factor for such infrastructure companies and validate the resilience of their business model amid growing demand for computing capacity for training and running neural networks.