Anthropic in Talks for Second Massive Compute Deal

Anthropic is reportedly negotiating a second Massive Compute Deal with British AI infrastructure company Nscale, a contract that could be worth roughly forty-five billion dollars and would deepen one of the most expensive partnerships in the technology industry. Bloomberg reported the talks on October 19, citing people familiar with the negotiations, which center on a second building at Nscale's under-development data center campus in West Virginia. If the agreement closes, the reported combined value of the two companies' partnership would approach ninety billion dollars.

The proposed facility would add about four hundred sixty megawatts of computing capacity running on Nvidia's newest AI accelerators, according to Data Center Dynamics, citing Bloomberg's reporting. Anthropic also holds a right of first refusal on a planned third building at the same site, which would let the artificial intelligence lab claim still more capacity as demand for its models grows. Both outlets stress that discussions remain ongoing and the terms could change, and representatives for the two companies declined to comment.

A partnership assembled in months

The speed of the relationship is the real story here. Nscale acquired the sprawling 2,250-acre site, a former industrial tract, in March of this year. In August, Anthropic signed a six-year agreement for a first building of the same size at the campus, with systems scheduled to start coming online in late 2027. In September, Nscale filed paperwork for a New York stock listing under the ticker NSCL. Now the two sides are discussing a sequel before the first building has even opened.

The campus itself is one of the largest AI construction projects in the United States. Nscale plans a first phase of up to two gigawatts expected online by the first half of 2028, with room to expand far beyond that. Because local grid power cannot keep pace with that ambition, the company intends to generate much of the electricity on site with fast-response natural gas generator sets, according to energy-industry coverage.

Why Nscale needs this win

The talks arrive at a delicate moment for Nscale. The company reported first-half revenue of about one hundred forty-one million dollars, up from roughly ten million a year earlier, alongside a net loss of just over one billion dollars, according to its public filing as summarized by crypto and markets press. Its contracted order book tops one hundred billion dollars, but that pipeline is concentrated in just two customers: Microsoft and Anthropic. Investors have pushed back on the company's roughly thirty-billion-dollar valuation target for the listing, with some telling bankers that a figure in the high teens of billions would be easier to sell.

Delivery problems make the skepticism concrete. Nscale's flagship Norwegian facility is running about six months behind schedule, with only a fraction of its planned capacity currently operating, according to AI industry coverage of the filing. This week Microsoft walked away from a separate Nscale project near London after grid officials signaled that electricity would not be available until the next decade. At the same time, Microsoft has committed to more than a gigawatt of capacity at the campus itself, a split verdict that says plenty about which bets the industry trusts.

The wider AI spending spree

Anthropic's hunt for computing power extends well beyond one partner. The company has reportedly signed more than a dozen letters of intent for data center leases with developers across the United States, alongside enormous cloud commitments including a two-hundred-billion-dollar agreement with Google and a fifty-billion-dollar arrangement with Fluidstack, according to trade-press reporting. It confidentially filed for its own public offering in June. The labs building frontier models are racing to lock in capacity years ahead of need, because the chips, power, and buildings required simply do not exist yet at the scale they want.

That race is exactly why a second Massive Compute Deal matters beyond the two companies. If the Massive Compute Deal closes, Anthropic secures the raw material for its next generation of models well into the next decade. If it collapses, or if construction slips the way other Nscale projects have, the cost of running advanced AI could climb, and those costs eventually reach the people and businesses that use the tools every day.

None of this is final. Nscale has acknowledged in its filing that it has not yet secured binding commitments for the financing needed to buy the chips and build the halls its contracts require. But the direction of travel is unmistakable: the AI industry is converting promises into concrete, and the companies that control the power supply are becoming as important as the ones that write the models. For more on how Nscale got here, see our earlier look at the British AI cloud's path to a New York listing, and for the parallel push to put AI agents into production, read about CharliAI's partnership with Protegrity. Washington's tightening stance on foreign AI models adds another wrinkle, as covered in the federal move against DeepSeek.