$45 Billion Supercomputing Mega Deal! Anthropic Partners with Nscale to Secure 460MW AI Data Center Capacity
AI company Anthropic is further securing computing power resources for the coming years.
According to Zhihui Finance APP, AI company Anthropic is further securing computing power resources for the coming years. According to informed sources, Anthropic has agreed to spend $45 billion to lease AI computing power from the flagship data center of AI cloud computing company Nscale, located in West Virginia, USA. This is another major computing power agreement recently signed by Anthropic, reflecting the company's large-scale preemptive reservation of computational capacity as it rapidly expands its business and prepares for an IPO.
Under the agreement, Nscale will use Nvidia's (NVDA.US) next-generation Vera Rubin chip to meet Anthropic's computing power needs, with related equipment expected to gradually go online starting at the end of next year.
Sources say the partnership lasts six years with a total value of around $45 billion, involving approximately 460 megawatts (MW) of electric capacity. This power scale is equivalent to the simultaneous electricity demand of about 345,000 American households, highlighting the enormous energy and data center infrastructure demands of large-scale AI model training and inference.
Anthropic, which owns the Claude AI model, has become one of the most important customers in the global data center computing power market in recent years.
In addition to Nscale, Anthropic has recently signed several other large-scale computing power agreements, including a $50 billion deal with AI cloud services provider Fluidstack, a $10 billion computing power agreement with infrastructure startup Volta Infra Holdings, and a roughly $45 billion computing resource partnership with Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPCX.US).
These deals show that Anthropic is securing long-term computing power from multiple infrastructure providers to mitigate the risk of computational bottlenecks that could arise from rapid future growth in AI business.
Anthropic is also currently the focus of significant attention in capital markets. As of May this year, the company’s valuation has reached about $965 billion and is expected to go public with an IPO soon. Previous reports indicated that Anthropic’s planned IPO could reach or even surpass the record previously set by SpaceX. Therefore, ensuring adequate and stable access to computing resources before going public has become a vital part of Anthropic’s expansion strategy.
Anthropic declined to comment on the Nscale deal.
For London-based Nscale, winning Anthropic as a major client is also highly significant. Nscale may launch a US IPO as early as next month and plans to raise up to $3 billion. The company has become one of the important players in the Neocloud market, similar to CoreWeave (CRWV.US), focusing on building data centers equipped with large numbers of AI chips and leasing computing capacity to AI companies.
For this lease, Anthropic is renting the first of three data centers in Nscale’s Monarch campus in West Virginia. Once completed, the entire campus is expected to have about 1.35 gigawatts (GW) of capacity. According to planning documents, full construction of the campus and its on-site power facilities is expected to require around $71 billion in investment, with the largest cost—about $47 billion—coming from AI chips. The servers in the other two data centers are expected to start operations from 2028.
Notably, the original potential tenant for this data center was Microsoft (MSFT.US), not Anthropic. In March this year, Microsoft announced it had signed an intention letter with Nscale to reserve capacity for its planned West Virginia data center. The two parties had already collaborated in Europe previously.
However, according to sources, Microsoft decided to withdraw from the West Virginia project earlier this summer, after which Anthropic took over and became the tenant of the project. Microsoft declined to comment. The partnership between Microsoft and Nscale did not end there. Nscale is currently building a large AI data center campus in Norway that will be used by Microsoft.
Besides the enormous capital investment, the Monarch campus will also have a significant impact on local employment.
According to planning documents, once the entire data center campus is operational, it is expected to directly provide about 645 jobs on site and indirectly create about 3,600 jobs in West Virginia. During the construction phase, around 4,375 people are expected to be directly employed.
Nscale previously told potential investors that before the planned IPO, the company had already secured about $51 billion in contract revenue. The company’s board of directors also includes former Meta (META.US) executive Sheryl Sandberg and former UK Deputy Prime Minister and former Meta Global Affairs President Nick Clegg.
Disclaimer: The content of this article solely reflects the author's opinion and does not represent the platform in any capacity. This article is not intended to serve as a reference for making investment decisions.
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