Anthropic secures $45bn Nscale AI computing capacity

Anthropic, the developer of the Claude AI model, has committed $45 billion over six years to secure computing capacity from British infrastructure firm Nscale. The agreement secures roughly 460 megawatts of computing capacity at Nscale's Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia, where Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin systems will supply the processing hardware.

Scheduled to begin in late 2027, the capacity expansion highlights the critical role of power, data centers, and processors in the competitive AI landscape. Anthropic's rapid infrastructure expansion is driven by the growing demand for its Claude models, particularly for model training and inference. Representing one-third of the initial 1.35-gigawatt capacity planned for the Monarch campus, the 460MW allocation is a significant anchor for the development.

Nscale, founded in 2024, has rapidly grown from an AI infrastructure operator to a major developer of large-scale computing campuses, raising $2 billion in March at a $14.6 billion valuation. The deal positions Nscale as a long-term customer and provides Anthropic with an alternative to Nvidia hardware, increasing competition among semiconductor suppliers.

Anthropic, which filed for an initial public offering earlier this year, has secured computing capacity from multiple suppliers to mitigate the risks associated with electricity and GPU shortages.