Anthropic agrees to pay Nscale $45 billion for West Virginia capacity after Microsoft walked
The $45 billion is already sitting in a two-year-old landlord’s backlog. The racks for that first West Virginia building are still a 2027 delivery.
Bloomberg‘s Brody Ford reports Anthropic agreed to spend $45 billion over six years to rent AI cloud computing from Nscale’s flagship West Virginia data center, about 460 megawatts.
The account is people familiar, unnamed.
The Next Web reprints the same figures. Bloomberg puts 460 megawatts at roughly what 345,000 American homes draw at once.
Nscale will use Nvidia Vera Rubin chips, which start to come online late next year, 2027. Anthropic is securing capacity ahead of going public.
This is the first of three buildings on a campus that reaches about 1.35 gigawatts when finished. Developing the full campus and an on-site power plant will cost about $71 billion according to planning documents, of which $47 billion is the chips.
Microsoft signed a letter of intent for the site in March and walked away during the summer, which is how Anthropic became the tenant. Nscale is building a campus in Norway for Microsoft.
Nscale is a two-year-old London company preparing a US IPO as soon as next month. TNW questioned the listing three weeks ago: Nscale’s $51 billion of contracted revenue is future revenue counted in full when a deal is signed, against roughly $100 million booked in a recent quarter.
This agreement is now the largest single entry in that column.
TNW also prints prior Anthropic compute deals with Fluidstack for $50 billion and SpaceX for $45 billion. Those are separate lines.
Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in May and is expected to list at record size. Sheryl Sandberg and former British deputy PM Nick Clegg sit on Nscale’s board.
The flagship is Appalachia. The listing is New York.
Rubin is a 2027 delivery. The $51 billion is still future revenue counted in full when a deal is signed.
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