A $45 billion supercomputing deal! Anthropic partners with Nscale to secure 460 megawatts of AI data center capacity.

The artificial intelligence company Anthropic is further securing computing resources for the coming years. According to informed sources, Anthropic has agreed to spend $45 billion to lease AI computing power from AI cloud computing company Nscale's flagship data center located in West Virginia, USA. This is another large-scale computing agreement signed by Anthropic recently, reflecting the company's rapid business expansion and its preparation for going public, as it is preemptively stocking up on computing capacity on a large scale. Under the agreement, Nscale will use NVIDIA Corporations new generation Vera Rubin chips to meet Anthropic's computing needs, with relevant equipment expected to gradually go into operation starting next year. Sources indicate that the collaboration is set for six years, with a total value of approximately $45 billion, involving about 460 megawatts (MW) of power capacity. This power scale is equivalent to the electricity demand of about 345,000 American households at the same time, highlighting the enormous energy and data center infrastructure needs for training and inference of large AI models. Anthropic owns the Claude AI model and has become one of the most significant customers in the global data center computing power market in recent years. In addition to Nscale, Anthropic has recently signed several large-scale computing agreements, including a $50 billion partnership with AI cloud computing provider Fluidstack, a $10 billion computing agreement with infrastructure startup Volta Infra Holdings, and a computing resources collaboration worth approximately $45 billion with SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk. These transactions demonstrate that Anthropic is locking in long-term computing resources through multiple infrastructure providers to mitigate potential computing capacity bottlenecks as its AI business experiences rapid growth. Anthropic is currently under heightened scrutiny from the capital markets. The company's valuation reached approximately $965 billion in May of this year, and it is expected to go public (IPO) soon. Previous reports indicate that Anthropic's planned IPO could match or even exceed the record set by SpaceX. Therefore, ensuring sufficient and stable computing resources for the future has become a crucial part of Anthropic's expansion strategy before its IPO. Anthropic declined to comment on the Nscale transaction. For Nscale, headquartered in London, securing a major customer like Anthropic is also significant. Nscale could potentially launch its U.S. IPO as early as next month, aiming to raise up to $3 billion. The company has become one of the key players in the Neocloud market, similar to CoreWeave, focusing on building data centers equipped with numerous AI chips and leasing computing power to AI companies. The data center that Anthropic is leasing is the first of three data centers in Nscale's Monarch Park in West Virginia. Upon completion of the entire park, it is expected to hold a capacity of around 1.35 gigawatts (GW). According to planning documents, the total investment needed to fully build the park and accompanying onsite power generation facilities is expected to be about $71 billion, with the largest cost coming from AI chips, estimated at approximately $47 billion. The servers in the other two data centers are expected to come online starting in 2028. It is worth noting that the potential initial tenant of this data center was not Anthropic, but Microsoft Corporation. In March of this year, Microsoft Corporation announced that it had signed a letter of intent with Nscale to reserve capacity for the planned data center in West Virginia. The two parties had also previously collaborated in Europe. However, informed sources indicated that Microsoft Corporation decided to withdraw from the West Virginia project earlier this summer, after which Anthropic took over and became the tenant for the project. Microsoft Corporation declined to comment on this matter. The cooperation between Microsoft Corporation and Nscale did not end as a result. Nscale is currently building a large AI data center park in Norway, which will be used by Microsoft Corporation. In addition to the massive capital input, the Monarch Park will also have a noticeable impact on local employment. According to planning documents, once the entire data center park is operational, it is expected to directly provide about 645 jobs on-site and indirectly create approximately 3,600 jobs in West Virginia. The construction phase is expected to directly employ about 4,375 people. Nscale previously indicated to potential investors that before its planned IPO, the company already had contracts worth around $51 billion. The companys board members also include former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg and former UK Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, who was Meta's former Global Affairs President.