Anthropic is renting computing power from British infrastructure provider Nscale for around 45 billion dollars. The six-year contract secures the AI company 460 megawatts of capacity at a new data center campus in West Virginia, equipped with Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin chips. Microsoft had originally secured the site but withdrew in the summer of 2026.
Nvidia chips go live at the Monarch campus starting late 2027
The contract covers Nscale’s Monarch campus in Mason County, West Virginia. According to the company, the site spans up to 2,250 acres, roughly 910 hectares, and is expected to grow to a total capacity of more than eight gigawatts. Anthropic’s share of 460 megawatts corresponds roughly to the annual electricity consumption of 374,000 US households; that comparison has not been independently verified. The capacity is set to come online in several tranches starting in late 2027, running on Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin generation, which, according to TechCrunch, combines several different chip types in one system. Nscale says it already operates more than a gigawatt of installed capacity on the site and touts its proximity to the established data center hubs around Ashburn and Chicago. The campus is designed to run independently of the regional power grid and without drawing on the municipal water supply.
Microsoft steps back, Anthropic steps in
The West Virginia site was originally reserved by Microsoft: the software company signed a letter of intent in March 2026 for 1.35 gigawatts at the site, also earmarked for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips. Microsoft withdrew over the summer of 2026; neither company gave a reason. Anthropic subsequently took over part of the freed-up capacity.
Nscale itself is only two years old, is based in London, and has a notably prominent board: former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg and former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who most recently led Meta’s global affairs, both sit on it. According to The Next Web, the company is preparing its own US stock listing, possibly as early as September 2026. The Anthropic contract is now the largest single item in Nscale’s contracted revenue backlog of 51 billion dollars, after the company had recently reported quarterly bookings of only around 100 million dollars.
Deal extends Anthropic’s billion-dollar streak ahead of its IPO
The Nscale contract joins a long series of similar agreements Anthropic has signed in recent months to lock in computing power. Just in August, the company formed the Theseus Infrastructure platform with investors Macquarie and GIC for further US data centers, and before that rented capacity in Norway from startup Volta; in July, Meta was reportedly negotiating a ten-billion-dollar deal with its own direct competitor. Altogether, Anthropic is reported to have racked up more than 180 billion dollars in computing commitments in 2026.
Anthropic attributes its hunger for capacity to growing demand for Claude, which has at times caused delays and outages during peak usage. The buildout is meant to ease such bottlenecks for business customers going forward. The spending also comes at a sensitive moment: Anthropic confidentially filed a prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2026, after raising fresh capital in May at a valuation of 965 billion dollars.
Whether the added computing power will noticeably ease Claude’s delays before Anthropic goes public remains to be seen. Just as important is how resilient Nscale’s own financing turns out to be: the two-year-old company is taking on a double-digit-billion-dollar buildout of the Monarch campus while simultaneously pursuing its own stock listing.
