Anthropic in Talks for Second $45bn Compute Deal with Nscale at West Virginia Campus

Anthropic is reportedly negotiating a second major compute agreement with neocloud provider Nscale that could be valued at up to $45 billion, underscoring the escalating capital commitments underpinning the artificial intelligence infrastructure buildout in the United States.

According to Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter, the proposed contract would see Anthropic lease 460MW of capacity in a second data center at Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia. The agreement would include Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, and Anthropic would reportedly hold a right of first refusal on the third building at the site. Neither Anthropic nor Nscale responded to requests for comment.

The talks follow a first agreement signed in August 2026 between the two companies, also for 460MW at the Monarch campus. That earlier deal established the framework for what could become one of the largest compute procurement relationships in the AI industry, with the combined value of the two contracts potentially reaching $90 billion.

The Monarch campus is Nscale's flagship project and its largest to date. The company acquired the 2,250-acre site in March 2026, and the campus has the potential to support up to 8GW of capacity. The first phase is planned at 2GW and is expected to come online by the first half of 2028, with power supplied by Caterpillar's G3500 series fast-response natural gas generator sets. Microsoft has separately signed on for 1.35GW of capacity at the site, for which Nscale is to deploy a large-scale GPU installation based on Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs.

The reported deal comes at an opportune moment for Nscale, which saw Microsoft withdraw from one of its capacity agreements earlier this week due to issues with the UK's grid connection queue. Both Anthropic and Nscale are also advancing toward planned initial public offerings. Nscale published its IPO prospectus in September, disclosing five active data centers offering a combined 55MW alongside 12 facilities in various stages of development. Anthropic confidentially filed for its IPO in June 2026.

The potential agreement reflects the broader race among AI labs to lock in large-scale, long-term compute capacity as model training and inference demands surge. For Nscale, securing another multi-billion-dollar commitment from a leading AI developer would reinforce its position in the competitive neocloud market and provide momentum ahead of its public listing. For Anthropic, the deal would further cement its infrastructure strategy around secured power and next-generation Nvidia silicon, even as questions mount over grid constraints and the pace of data center delivery in key markets.