Anthropic and Nscale in Talks on New Computing Deal Worth About $45 Billion
Key Facts
Nscale is negotiating a new cloud computing agreement with Anthropic that could be worth about $45 billion, Reuters reported, citing a person familiar with the talks in October 2026. The negotiations concern leasing a second facility at the Monarch data center campus in West Virginia, expanding the companies' AI infrastructure relationship. The talks follow existing infrastructure agreements between Anthropic and Nscale worth up to $44.6 billion, according to public offering documents cited by Investing.com. The agreement currently under discussion represents an additional deal under negotiation, separate from the existing commitments disclosed in those documents. According to Bloomberg, negotiations remain ongoing, and the terms could change before an agreement is reached.
The second facility under discussion would provide 460 megawatts of computing capacity using Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, according to Bloomberg's report on the proposed project. Anthropic's options at Monarch extend to the campus's planned third building, for which the company holds priority contracting rights, according to the source who spoke to Reuters. The source described the arrangement as a "right of first refusal," alongside the ongoing talks over the second facility. For the campus development, Nscale says planned capital investment in the Monarch project exceeds $20 billion. That amount relates to investment in the project itself, while the value under discussion in the new talks concerns Anthropic leasing computing capacity from Nscale.
Anthropic's efforts to secure computing resources come as the company said growth in consumer usage had affected the reliability and performance of its services, particularly during peak hours. In announcing its agreement with Amazon, it committed to spending more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services technologies over the ten years following the announcement. Describing the commitment, the company said: "We are committing more than $100 billion over the next ten years," as part of its agreement to obtain technology resources from Amazon. Separately, Anthropic said in announcing its partnership with Google and Broadcom that diversifying chip platforms allows workloads to be assigned to the chips best suited to each. It said this diversity translates into "better performance and greater resilience," explaining the operational purpose of distributing workloads across different platforms.
For Nscale, the talks coincide with its progress toward a stock market listing after it announced the filing of a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering. The company applied to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NSCL, according to its announcement of the proposed offering. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are acting as lead bookrunners under the announced arrangements for the offering. In its pre-IPO financing announcement, Nscale said its total contract value exceeded $103 billion, the figure it disclosed for its contracted business. That total relates to contract value, while the talks with Anthropic represent a potential agreement whose terms the two sides are still negotiating.
To finance its operations ahead of the offering, Nscale announced a convertible financing package that includes an initial tranche of $2.36 billion at closing, according to a company statement. The Abu Dhabi Investment Council was among the investors backing the round, alongside an additional $1 billion financing commitment from Nvidia. The announced package structure separates the tranche tied to closing from the amount Nvidia committed to provide at a later date. This places the Abu Dhabi Investment Council among the participants financing Nscale, while Nvidia's relationship with the company combines a financial commitment with the use of its chips at the proposed facility. These financing arrangements precede the public offering process that Nscale began by filing its registration statement with the U.S. regulator.
As for the next financial step, Nscale expects the additional financing committed by Nvidia to be provided in mid-November 2026, according to the timetable in the convertible financing announcement. On Monarch's operations, the company expects an initial 2 gigawatts of power capacity to come online by the first half of 2028. That date appeared in Nscale's announcement concerning American Intelligence & Power Corporation, as part of its plan to supply electricity to the campus. The company then plans to expand power capacity to about 8 gigawatts in 2031, according to the same project announcement. The announced power development timetable thus extends from bringing the initial capacity online to the subsequent expansion, while the second facility Anthropic is negotiating to lease remains part of the Monarch project.