Anthropic to Spend $45 Billion to Lease Nscale Compute, Taking Over Project Exited by Microsoft

TradingKey - Anthropic has agreed to spend $45 billion over the next six years to lease data center computing capacity from AI cloud infrastructure company Nscale at its Monarch campus in West Virginia. According to people familiar with the matter, the deal involves approximately 460 megawatts of power capacity, enough to meet the simultaneous electricity demand of about 345,000 U.S. households.

Reportedly, Nscale plans to use Nvidia Vera Rubin chips to provide computing power for Anthropic, with the chips expected to gradually come online starting late next year. As the developer of the Claude chatbot, Anthropic has continuously secured data center and AI chip resources in advance in recent years to meet expanding demands for model training, inference, and commercial services.

The Monarch campus has a planned total capacity of approximately 1.35 gigawatts, with Nscale expected to invest about $71 billion in development, including around $47 billion to purchase AI chips. Anthropic's agreement covers the first building to be constructed at the campus, while the remaining buildings are expected to begin providing computing capacity starting in 2028.

The project was originally planned to be leased by Microsoft, which signed a letter of intent with Nscale in March this year to reserve capacity for the proposed data center. However, according to people familiar with the matter, Microsoft exited the project this summer, after which Anthropic became the potential tenant.

For Nscale, securing Anthropic as a long-term tenant helps support its large-scale data center construction and IPO preparations. As previously reported by Bloomberg, Nscale could conduct an initial public offering in the U.S. as early as next month, and has disclosed approximately $51 billion in cumulative contracted revenue to potential investors.