Six years, 460 megawatts, one campus in West Virginia
Anthropic and Nscale subsidiaries executed four GPU services agreements on August 25, 2026. Nscale's September 18 filing puts aggregate payments at up to about $44.6 billion, subject to delivery and service availability. Service terms start when Anthropic accepts each tranche of Vera Rubin infrastructure. The filing also says Nscale had not yet obtained binding financing commitments needed to perform the agreements. The payment cap is neither cash already paid nor proof of operational capacity. [1]
Reports published August 26 and 27 described roughly 460 megawatts at Monarch in West Virginia over six years, with service expected to begin in late 2027. Their rounded $45 billion headline describes the same commitment; the report dates are separate from the contract execution. [4][3]
Nscale bought the 2,250 acre Monarch site in March 2026, with room for up to 8 gigawatts of capacity across future phases. Microsoft has separately signed on for 1.35 gigawatts there, also on Vera Rubin hardware, which makes Anthropic one of at least two large customers building out the same campus rather than the sole tenant. [4]
A neocloud, not a household name
Nscale is a British AI infrastructure company founded only in 2024. It does not sell general-purpose cloud services to the public the way AWS or Azure do. Its business includes building data center capacity against long-term contracts for AI labs and large cloud providers. A signed customer contract does not by itself establish that construction and equipment financing has been secured. It had already signed Microsoft to a deal in Norway before this agreement. [3][4][1]
Long-term contracted capacity and live capacity are different. The Anthropic agreements require delivery, acceptance and sustained availability; Nscale also disclosed financing and termination risks. Their scale does not establish that the hardware was already installed or that the maximum revenue would be received. [1]
One deal in a run of them
TechCrunch counted the Nscale contract as the latest in an eight month run: a $10 billion, six year deal with Volta for Norwegian data center capacity earlier the same month, a $5 billion compute deal with AMD in July, the SpaceX cluster rental reported at $1.25 billion a month signed in May, and the $25 billion expansion of the Amazon partnership that added 5 gigawatts of capacity in April, alongside a separate expansion with Google and Broadcom that same month. [3]
The agreements add another supplier to Anthropic's planned compute resources. Their existence does not show that delivery delays or financing risks have disappeared. Nscale's filing describes those conditions explicitly. [1]
The IPO in the reporting belongs to Nscale, not Anthropic
Data Center Dynamics' coverage of this deal does mention an IPO, but the company preparing one is Nscale, which it reports was targeting roughly $3 billion in a US offering around the same time, not Anthropic. Neither Data Center Dynamics nor TechCrunch's account of the deal ties Anthropic's compute buildout to an Anthropic IPO. A reader connecting this deal to Anthropic going public should treat that as unconfirmed rather than reported. [4]