Nscale and Anthropic are back at the well. The Nvidia-backed AI cloud firm is in advanced talks to sell Anthropic a second roughly $45 billion chunk of compute capacity at its Monarch campus in West Virginia, according to Bloomberg, in a deal that could be finalized within days. Neither company commented, and Reuters said it could not independently verify the report — but the numbers are consistent with a first agreement signed in August.
That first deal was a six-year, $45 billion lease for 460 megawatts — roughly the power consumption of 345,000 American homes, all of it spoken for by Claude — at the same 2,250-acre site in Point Pleasant, with deliveries beginning in late 2027. The second building would add another ~460MW of Nvidia Vera Rubin accelerators. Anthropic also holds a right of first refusal on a third building, per AI Weekly's summary of the coverage. None of this hardware exists yet: Vera Rubin mass shipments aren't expected until late 2027.
This is what the AI race actually looks like now: buying futures in electricity. Anthropic has signed letters of intent for data center leases with more than a dozen developers and committed to renting more than 10 gigawatts of servers from cloud providers — including a $200 billion arrangement with Google and a $50 billion partnership with Fluidstack, plus a massive cluster of AWS's custom Trainium hardware, Data Center Dynamics reports. The bottleneck of the AI era isn't ideas; it's megawatts.
Here's the tension. The same week Anthropic talks about doubling down at Monarch, Microsoft walked away from anchoring one of Nscale's flagship data centers after power connection delays pushed its expected supply date into the 2030s, per Reuters. And Nscale's own run-up to its New York Stock Exchange listing under the ticker NSCL is wobbling — investors are pushing back on a roughly $30 billion valuation target, with some telling bankers $16–19 billion is the real number, while its Norwegian flagship runs six months behind schedule, AI Weekly reports.
Demand is unmistakably real — Anthropic keeps signing. But the infrastructure underneath these announcements is being sold before it's built, priced before it's public, and in some cases delayed before it's delivered. If the money side starts pricing in that risk, the next $45 billion deal won't come quite so easily.
— via Reuters