Anthropic signs $45B compute deal with Britain’s Nscale

Anthropic has agreed to spend $45B over six years renting AI computing power from Nscale’s flagship West Virginia data centre development, covering about 460 megawatts. Nscale is a London company preparing a US listing as soon as next month.

Anthropic has agreed to spend $45B renting computing power, and the landlord is British. The six-year deal covers capacity at Nscale’s flagship data centre development in West Virginia, amounting to around 460 megawatts.

That is a substantial quantity of electricity. Bloomberg puts it at roughly what 345,000 American homes draw at any one time.

The hardware is next generation. Nscale will use Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips, which begin coming online late next year, in the first of three buildings on a campus reaching about 1.35 gigawatts when finished.

Nscale itself is a two-year-old London company. It is preparing a US initial public offering as soon as next month, and TNW questioned the basis of that listing three weeks ago.

The question was about what a backlog means. Nscale’s $51B of contracted revenue is future revenue that counts in full the moment a deal is signed, against roughly $100mn booked in a recent quarter.

This agreement is now the largest single entry in that column. It follows a year in which Anthropic has signed compute deals with a week-old startup, with Fluidstack for $50B and with SpaceX for $45B .

Microsoft got to West Virginia first and left. It signed a letter of intent for the site in March and walked away during the summer, which is how Anthropic became the tenant.

The site’s own economics are enormous. Developing the full campus and an on-site power plant will cost about $71B according to planning documents, of which $47B is the chips.

All of this is happening in front of a listing. Anthropic was valued at $965B in May and is expected to list at record size, which makes secured capacity a story for the prospectus as much as for the engineers.

Europe’s involvement is the company, not the concrete. Nscale has Sheryl Sandberg and former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg on its board, and is building a campus in Norway for Microsoft.

But the flagship is in Appalachia and the listing is in New York. Britain’s largest AI infrastructure business is spending its capital and selling its shares somewhere other than home.