Anthropic is in talks for a second $45 billion compute deal with Nscale

Anthropic is in talks to buy about $45 billion of computing power from Nscale, the Nvidia-backed AI cloud and data center developer. The new deal would cover a second building at Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia and deliver about 460 megawatts running Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips. Anthropic would also hold the right of first refusal on a third building.

This would be the second deal of this size between the two. A little over a month ago they announced a $45 billion agreement, and Nscale's own IPO filing lists Anthropic infrastructure agreements worth as much as about $44.6 billion. Talks are ongoing and the details could still change.

The news lands the same week Microsoft pulled out of a deal to anchor a flagship Nscale data center in the UK. Power connection delays pushed that site's expected supply date into the 2030s.

Anthropic has signed a long string of giant compute deals over the past year, and some investors worry that AI companies are spending too much for too little profit.

Our take

Compute is now bought in tens of billions at a time, and power access decides who can deliver it. A site with power beats a site with a famous anchor tenant.