Anthropic has signed a roughly $45 billion, six-year cloud computing agreement with British AI infrastructure firm Nscale, according to reports first published by Bloomberg on August 26, 2026. The deal will supply the Claude maker with about 460 megawatts of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPU capacity out of a Nscale flagship data center in West Virginia, and marks the second-largest compute contract ever disclosed by an AI lab.
The structure of the deal
Under the agreement, Nscale will build out and operate liquid-cooled halls housing NVIDIA's next-generation Vera Rubin systems, with capacity expected to begin serving Anthropic workloads in late 2027 and ramp through 2033. The West Virginia campus is one of several U.S. sites Nscale has secured with long-duration power and grid interconnects, and the West Virginia power authority is expected to weigh in on the load additions.
Anthropic's compute-gobbling streak
The Nscale contract is the latest in a rapid-fire series of capacity moves by Anthropic ahead of an anticipated IPO. In August alone the company committed $10 billion to Volta for a Norway data center and reached a computing agreement with SpaceX providing $1.25 billion of capacity per month, on top of a $5 billion deal with AMD in July for Instinct MI-series accelerators. Bloomberg has separately reported that Anthropic is targeting an October 2026 IPO at a $2 trillion valuation.
What it means for Nscale
For Nscale, the contract is transformative. The UK-headquartered hyperscaler has raised more than $4 billion in equity and a $900 million revolving credit facility to build out sovereign AI capacity, and it acquired Anyscale in July to layer the Ray distributed-compute stack on top of its bare-metal offering. Anthropic's commitment gives Nscale a marquee anchor tenant and a runway to further extend liquid-cooled builds in the U.S. and Europe.
Reporting based on coverage from Bloomberg, CNBC, TechCrunch and Yahoo Finance.