Nscale has secured a roughly $45 billion contract for AI compute capacity at its Monarch campus in West Virginia, with Reuters reporting that Anthropic is the customer behind the six-year deal.
While we know that Nscale has definitely secured a $45 billion compute contract, thanks to a regulatory announcement from Aker, which describes Nscale as its second-largest portfolio holding, we don’t know who the customer is for sure.
Reuters, however, citing a person familiar with the matter, has named Anthropic as that customer. The agreement is understood to cover around 460MW and involve Nvidia’s forthcoming Vera Rubin systems.
The commitment would give Nscale a major anchor customer for Monarch just as the British AI infrastructure company prepares for a possible US stock-market listing.
Nscale’s first phase at the West Virginia site is designed to provide 1.35GW of AI compute capacity, meaning the reported Anthropic agreement would account for roughly a third of the initial development. Anthropic will reportedly take the first of three planned buildings.
Microsoft steps away from Nscale deal
The agreement also appears to reshape the customer plans originally outlined for Monarch.
In March, Nscale signed a letter of intent with Microsoft covering up to 1.35GW at the campus and around 430,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, with deployments expected to begin in late 2027.
Bloomberg now reports that Microsoft walked away from that arrangement earlier this summer, making capacity available to Anthropic. Nscale is expected to make the capacity available in late 2027, broadly matching the timetable previously outlined for the first Monarch deployments.
Additional compute has become an increasingly visible priority for Anthropic. Earlier this year, rising demand forced the company to introduce tighter usage limits for some Claude services, before it said a separate agreement for more than 300MW of SpaceX compute capacity would allow those limits to increase again. The episode even prompted OpenAI’s Thibault Sottiaux to point out that his company had “the compute and efficient models to support” continued Codex access, although some have questioned whether OpenAI is equally struggling with access to compute after introducing new limits to those on its Plus paid plans.
Contract lands ahead of possible IPO
The deal between Anthropic and Nscale arrives just days after reports that Nscale could seek to raise as much as $3 billion through a US IPO, potentially as soon as September.
Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are reportedly working on the possible offering, while prospective investors have been told that Nscale has around $51 billion of contracted revenue, although it’s not known whether that includes the new deal with Anthropic.
Of course, that IPO will pale in comparison to Anthropic’s, which is also expected to take place in the next 12 months. That IPO could become the biggest ever, with the company telling investors that it sees its total addressable market exceeding $30 trillion. That’s above the $28.5 trillion that SpaceX claimed during its blockbuster IPO.
