Anthropic continues compute-gobbling streak in $45 billion deal with Nscale

Anthropic, an AI lab, has entered into a significant $45 billion deal with Nscale, a British AI infrastructure company, to acquire compute power, according to a source familiar with the agreement. Nscale, established in 2024, is set to provide Anthropic's services with compute via Nvidia’s state-of-the-art Vera Rubin chips, a new generation of chip systems.

The power will commence in late 2027, as per the source. This deal, reported by Bloomberg, is part of a series of compute partnerships for Anthropic. Bloomberg highlights that the agreement extends for six years and will be sourced from Nscale's main data center in West Virginia. In the past eight months, Anthropic has rapidly expanded its compute capacity to compete more effectively with rivals, particularly OpenAI.

Earlier this month, Anthropic signed a $10 billion deal with Volta, a January-founded AI cloud startup, securing a six-year cloud computing power supply from a Norwegian data center. In July, Anthropic also inked a $5 billion compute-related deal with AMD. In May, the company announced a large computing deal with SpaceX, providing $1.25 billion worth of capacity monthly from two SpaceX data centers.

April saw Anthropic extend its partnership with Amazon, gaining access to 5 gigawatts of compute, and also expanded its relationship with Google and Broadcom. Anthropic is part of a broader trend of major players, such as Google, OpenAI, and Meta, also pursuing more AI horsepower through aggressive compute capacity acquisition.