Anthropic is in talks with cloud provider Nscale over computing power worth roughly $45 billion. Bloomberg reports this citing people familiar with the negotiations. A deal could close within days. Both Anthropic and Nscale declined to comment.
The second building at Monarch
The talks cover a second facility at Nscale’s Monarch campus in West Virginia. It would deliver 460 megawatts of computing power running on Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin generation. Anthropic holds a right of first refusal on a third building expected at the site, the people said. The campus as a whole is designed to scale past 8 gigawatts of gross power, according to Nscale’s IPO filing.
The same ground was once meant for Microsoft. The company signed a letter of intent for the planned data center in March and walked away over the summer, which freed up the space Anthropic is now taking.
What Anthropic has already booked
Nscale already holds agreements with Anthropic worth as much as $44.6 billion, again per the filing. That makes Anthropic one of its biggest customers. On top of that sit $50 billion with Fluidstack, $10 billion with Volta Infrastructure and $45 billion with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The other side of that ledger explains why the money has to come from somewhere: I wrote about the Project North Star subordinated debt three days ago. Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in May.
Nscale needs this deal for its own listing
Nscale is targeting a valuation of about $30 billion in its market debut. Some investors think that is too rich and have pushed for less. Another multibillion-dollar contract with Anthropic would be the strongest argument Nscale can put on the table. The company filed publicly in September, is still working through SEC comments and has yet to start marketing, even though the required 15-day waiting period has long passed. Last month it raised $3.36 billion in a pre-IPO round led by Dan Loeb’s Third Point, with Nvidia, Apollo, Citadel, Hudson Bay Capital and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council taking part.
What makes this interesting is how the two listings prop each other up and weigh each other down. Nscale sells investors on Anthropic’s demand; Anthropic sells investors on the growth that this computing power makes possible. Both stories rest on the same assumption. Meanwhile, investors have spent weeks looking harder at the debt behind these data centers. In that climate a $45 billion contract is not only proof of demand. It is also one more obligation on the books.