Anthropic and Nscale Near a Second $45 Billion Compute Deal — Taking Their Bet to $90 Billion

By Hamza Faisal

The AI industry's appetite for computing power just got bigger — again. Anthropic and AI infrastructure provider Nscale are in talks for a second $45 billion compute deal, Bloomberg reported on Monday, just over a month after the pair announced their first partnership of the same size. People familiar with the matter said the two companies are on the verge of announcing the deal, though the sources cautioned that talks are still underway and details could change.

If signed, the agreement would take the total computing commitments between the Claude maker and the data center startup to a staggering $90 billion — one of the largest infrastructure investments in AI history, and a fresh sign that compute has become the industry's most fiercely contested bottleneck.

A second Monarch building, with an option on a third

According to Reuters, which spoke to a person familiar with the matter, the talks concern a second facility at Nscale's Monarch data center campus in West Virginia. The new building would deliver about 460 megawatts of computing power running on Nvidia's Vera Rubin AI chips — the same class of hardware at the heart of the August deal, in which Anthropic agreed to spend $45 billion over six years renting AI cloud capacity from the site.

The source added that Anthropic also holds the right of first refusal on Monarch's expected third building, giving it a claim on still more capacity as the campus grows. Neither company has commented publicly on the negotiations, and the terms remain fluid. Nscale has grown at a remarkable pace since launch, with total contracted value rising from $100 million to more than $103 billion in just two and a half years, and the company's prospectus names Microsoft and Anthropic as expected major future customers.

The $90 billion question

The sheer scale of the spending has made some investors nervous. A segment of the market worries that AI companies are committing enormous sums to infrastructure for too little profit, and Bloomberg reported that a cohort of investors has urged Anthropic to lower its IPO valuation target after a series of market setbacks for AI companies. Last week, Nscale rival CoreWeave's shares slumped amid concerns over its $50 billion debt load, fueling a global selloff in AI stocks.

Still, Anthropic has pressed on with the partnerships, driven by the belief that the outlay will pay off. Training and running frontier models requires enormous amounts of computing power, and companies are racing to lock in capacity years in advance — a bet that securing infrastructure now will matter more than the debt it takes to build it.

Everyone is heading to market

Both companies are also pursuing IPOs. Anthropic is still expected to go public this year, even as investors sharpen their scrutiny of debt-fueled AI expansion. Nscale, meanwhile, is seeking to go public as well, though Bloomberg reported it is facing investor pushback over its proposed $30 billion valuation.

The negotiations also come days after Microsoft pulled out of its deal to anchor a flagship Nscale data center in Loughton, UK, following power connection delays that pushed the site's expected supply date into the 2030s. Nscale remains, on paper, one of the fastest-scaling infrastructure startups in the world — and Anthropic's willingness to double down suggests it sees compute access as existential to its future. Whether $90 billion in commitments can actually be built on time is the question investors will now watch.

— Hamza Faisal