IA en un minutoNewsBusiness and products
Nscale and Anthropic in talks over a $45 billion cloud computing deal, Bloomberg reports
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
Anthropic wants to add computing capacity from Nscale through a contract that, according to Bloomberg, would be worth about $45 billion. The power would come from another building at the Monarch campus in West Virginia: 460 megawatts with NVIDIA Vera Rubin chips. Neither Anthropic nor Nscale has confirmed it, and the terms could still shift.
Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude, is negotiating a cloud computing deal with Nscale that may reach roughly $45 billion, Bloomberg reported on Monday, October 19, citing people familiar with the talks. Nscale is an AI cloud computing company backed by NVIDIA that also develops data centers.
According to Bloomberg, the capacity would come from a second building on Nscale's Monarch data center campus in West Virginia (United States): 460 megawatts running Vera Rubin, NVIDIA's next generation of AI chips. The agreement could be signed within a matter of days, although negotiations have not finished and the terms may still change, according to Investing.com.
It would not be the first deal between the two companies. In August, Anthropic had already committed to spending $45 billion on renting AI computing capacity at that same campus, according to Reuters, in a translation published by MarketScreener. Bloomberg adds that the infrastructure agreements Anthropic has already signed with Nscale add up to as much as roughly $44.6 billion, according to the document Nscale has submitted to the regulator to go public, and that Anthropic holds a right of first refusal over the third building planned at Monarch, meaning it gets first option to take it on matching terms.
The talks coincide with Nscale's preparations to go public, where it is aiming for a valuation of roughly $30 billion, according to Investing.com. Reuters notes that investors are looking more closely at companies that borrow to build AI infrastructure: last week, shares of CoreWeave, an Nscale competitor, plunged amid concern over its $50 billion in liabilities. It also points out that Microsoft pulled out of an arrangement to be the reference customer at a flagship Nscale data center, because delays in connecting it to the power grid were pushing delivery back to the 2030s.
Neither Nscale nor Anthropic wanted to comment to Bloomberg. Reuters, which also picked up the report, says it has not been able to verify it on its own.
The reports published so far do not say how long the possible contract would last or when the second building would be ready.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
That a model developer is negotiating a second giant contract with the same provider within a few months says a lot about where the limit of AI lies today: in buildings, electricity and chips, more than in software. For Nscale, another customer of that size strengthens its stock market debut, but it also increases its dependence on a single buyer, and the Microsoft case is a reminder that a project can be delayed for years by the power connection. For anyone using Claude at work nothing changes in the short term; in the long run, more capacity could help bring fewer usage limits and a more stable service. It is worth reading for what it is: an unsigned negotiation, told by anonymous sources.
Source: Bloomberg · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
