Key Notes
- Anthropic is reportedly negotiating a second Nscale computing agreement worth around $45 billion, covering another facility at the West Virginia site.
- Nscale’s IPO filing discloses existing Anthropic contracts worth up to approximately $44.6 billion, with payments tied to infrastructure and service commitments.
- The proposed expansion underlines the scale of Claude’s compute requirements, while financing, construction and delivery remain central to turning contracts into usable capacity.
Anthropic is negotiating a second computing agreement with Nscale that could be worth roughly $45 billion, extending the Claude developer’s push to secure infrastructure for the AI race. The proposed deal would cover another 460-megawatt data center at the same West Virginia site as its first agreement.
A person familiar with the discussions confirmed the talks to CNBC, which reported the details on October 20 after Bloomberg first disclosed the negotiations. The expansion has not been announced as a completed contract, and Anthropic declined to comment.
A Second Deal on Top of an Existing Commitment
The relationship already has substantial financial weight. Nscale’s September 18 IPO filing records agreements signed with Anthropic on August 25 that provide for payments of up to approximately $44.6 billion. Those contracts cover dedicated GPU infrastructure at the Monarch Compute Campus using Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems.
The filing describes four separate agreements, with capacity delivered in tranches and multiyear service terms beginning when each tranche is accepted. That makes the headline value a potential stream of payments over time, rather than money already received by Nscale or an immediate purchase of a completed data center.
Adding the reported new proposal to the existing agreement would put the potential total near $90 billion. That is an indication of the scale under discussion, not a disclosed combined contract value. Final terms, delivery arrangements and whether the second agreement closes remain important unresolved details.
Monarch’s Selling Point Is Power as Well as Chips
Nscale’s campus overview places Monarch in Mason County, West Virginia, on more than 2,250 acres. It targets 1.35 gigawatts of AI computing capacity in its first phase by early 2028, with a longer-term expansion path above 8 gigawatts of potential power. Those figures describe different measures and stages of the development; they should not be treated as capacity already available to Anthropic.
The company says Monarch will generate its electricity on site, independently of the public grid, and identifies Nvidia and Caterpillar as development partners. For an AI lab, the practical attraction is access to an integrated supply of power, cooling and computing. A large allocation of accelerators only becomes useful when the surrounding facility can run them reliably.
Claude’s Infrastructure Strategy Spans Multiple Suppliers
The Nscale discussions sit alongside Anthropic’s wider effort to diversify its computing supply. In April, the company announced an agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity expected to start coming online in 2027. It also described using AWS Trainium, Google TPUs and Nvidia GPUs to match workloads to different hardware.
Our coverage of Anthropic’s Lambda agreement showed another part of that strategy: securing large blocks of capacity from specialized providers. The aim is broader than training a single new model. Claude products also need computing resources whenever customers run coding tasks, ask questions or delegate work to agents.
Big Contracts Still Have to Become Working Infrastructure
Nscale’s existing Anthropic contracts include delivery and service-availability conditions. The September prospectus warns that missed delivery deadlines can give Anthropic the right to terminate an affected tranche. It also said the necessary financing had not yet been secured through binding commitments as of that filing, highlighting the gap between signing customers and funding construction and equipment.
There has been subsequent financing progress. On September 25, Nscale announced a $3.36 billion convertible financing package: an initial $2.36 billion tranche and a further $1 billion commitment from Nvidia, expected to fund in mid-November. That announcement supports its expansion plans, while keeping a distinction between money available at closing and a later commitment.
For Anthropic, the commercial question is whether rising Claude demand can justify the infrastructure being reserved. Its reported third-quarter growth gives the buildout a stronger revenue backdrop. The next test for both companies is execution: turning contracted spending and development plans into operating systems that deliver useful computing at a sustainable cost.
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