Anthropic has agreed to spend $45 billion over six years renting computing power from Nscale, according to sources at both companies who talked to CNBC. The deal covers about 460 megawatts at the Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia, running on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, starting late next year.
Neither company will confirm it. Anthropic didn't respond to IT Pro's request for comment, and an Nscale spokesperson said they couldn't confirm the reported details.
Forget the dollars, watch the megawatts
$45 billion is a hard number to feel. 460 megawatts is easier, and it's the one that matters, because electricity is the bottleneck everything else waits behind now. What Anthropic actually bought is six years of guaranteed power, converted into compute.
It's not the only such purchase, either. There's a $5 billion deal with AMD, an arrangement with SpaceX for up to 300 megawatts, an existing Oracle deal, and a multi-gigawatt TPU agreement with Google and Broadcom. That's a lab locking in supply from every direction at once, on the theory that capacity runs out before customers do.
Who is Nscale?
Three years ago, nobody. The company was spun out of an Australian bitcoin miner in 2024, raised $2 billion in a Series C earlier this year at a $14.6 billion valuation, and is expected to go public any minute.
The West Virginia site came with an acquisition. Back in January, the American Intelligence and Power Corporation unveiled plans for a 2,250-acre campus in Mason County — the first state-certified microgrid-based AI project, with up to 2GW of natural gas generation on site and a path to 8GW. Two months later Nscale bought the whole company and landed Microsoft as Monarch's first tenant, for 1.35GW of Vera Rubin compute. Phase one opens at the end of 2027.
Nscale also has a data center running in Norway, another about to open there, sites planned in Essex and Texas, and partner facilities scattered across Europe and North America.
What a private grid fixes, and what it doesn't
Monarch makes its own electricity, which sidesteps the complaint that trails data centers into every county they land in: that they push up bills and strain the grid. The campus is off-grid, so local supply and prices stay where they were.
Everything else still applies. Neighbors have reported construction mess, torn-up roads, and flooding. One report cited by IT Pro found 60% of homeowners in nearby areas sold up and left rather than live next to it. Advocacy groups have questioned water use; Nscale says municipal and residential supply won't be touched. Environmental groups point at what's turning the turbines — natural gas burns the same either way, private grid or public one.
The upside is just as concrete. EY estimates the campus will make up more than a third of Mason County's economy once it's running.
Why the timing matters
Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO in June and has been meeting investors since. Committing $45 billion in future spending right before a listing says something specific about the demand the company expects — and public markets will put a price on that claim soon enough.
The backdrop is a cloud business having its best run ever. Google Cloud grew revenue 82% last quarter, its strongest yet. OpenAI has been signing infrastructure deals on a similar scale. Contracts like this one are the reason those numbers look the way they do.
The bet nobody can settle yet
These commitments are long, enormous, and only sensible if demand keeps climbing. Anthropic is betting that in six years it'll want every megawatt it reserved, and then some. Nscale is betting it can actually build the thing on time.
Mason County gets a third of its economy and a gas plant it didn't have before. That's the trade a growing number of American counties are being asked to weigh.
Image: hartono subagio, via Pexels
