Key points
- Financial news wires reported on August 26 that Anthropic will lease an Nscale data center in West Virginia for $45 billion and receive 460 megawatts of power.
- Nscale is expected to spend about $71 billion to develop the site, its Monarch Compute Campus in Mason County, West Virginia.
- Anthropic and Nscale are both private. Nscale, backed by Nvidia (NVDA), is reportedly seeking a US IPO of up to $3 billion.
Anthropic will lease a data center in West Virginia from Nscale for $45 billion, financial news wires reported on August 26. Under the reported terms, Anthropic will receive 460 megawatts of power from the site, and Nscale is expected to spend about $71 billion to develop it.
The site is Nscale's Monarch Compute Campus in Mason County, West Virginia. Nscale acquired the 2,250-acre, gas-powered project earlier this year and has said it could hold more than 8 gigawatts of computing capacity. Microsoft (MSFT) was the campus's first anchor tenant and commissioned 1.35 gigawatts there in March.
The lease would add to a long run of compute deals for Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models. The company has committed to renting more than 10 gigawatts of servers, and Google (GOOGL) has agreed to backstop billions of dollars of its data center leases, according to reports. Anthropic's other recent deals include a $19 billion lease with TeraWulf (WULF), $10 billion with Volta and $9.1 billion with Riot Platforms (RIOT). Anthropic itself could file to go public within days.
Nscale is a Nvidia (NVDA)-backed AI cloud company that has grown quickly this year. It struck a deal worth up to $14 billion to supply Microsoft with about 200,000 Nvidia chips, agreed to buy software startup Anyscale for $1.65 billion, and is reportedly seeking a US initial public offering of up to $3 billion.
Is there a stock that benefits?
Not directly. Neither Anthropic nor Nscale is publicly traded, so there is no clean way to own either one. The listed name closest to the deal is Nvidia, whose chips fill Nscale's sites, and we have tracked the same buildout through the neocloud companies that rent GPUs to the AI labs. Nscale's planned IPO would give investors a way in later. The open question is whether all this announced demand turns into real usage, which several states have started to doubt.
As of midday on August 26, neither Anthropic nor Nscale had issued a formal announcement, and the terms came from breaking wire reports.
