Anthropic Is Negotiating a Second $45B Bet on Nscale

 

Anthropic — the AI lab whose own investors argued last week that its November IPO should be priced a quarter cheaper than planned — is negotiating to spend another $45 billion on cloud computing. With the same obscure London company it already handed $45 billion to in August.

Bloomberg reported on Monday that Nscale, the Nvidia-backed "neocloud" that filed for a New York IPO last month, is in talks to sell Anthropic a second block of capacity at its Monarch data centre campus in West Virginia: a second building delivering 460 megawatts of computing power on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin AI chips. Anthropic also holds the right of first refusal on the campus's expected third building. Neither company commented, and Reuters, which carried the report, said it could not independently verify it. The talks are ongoing, and details could change.

Photo: A corridor of server racks inside a modern data centre (illustrative — not Nscale's Monarch campus). Credit: Simon Waldherr / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Stop and look at that sentence again, because it's doing a lot of heavy lifting. A company whose investors are openly haggling its valuation down from $2 trillion to $1.5 trillion is simultaneously negotiating to lock in $90 billion — give or take — of computing rent with one supplier. In a market where rival neocloud CoreWeave's shares just slumped on fears about its $50 billion debt pile, fuelling a global AI stock rout. Days after Microsoft walked away from Nscale's flagship UK data centre because the power wouldn't arrive until the 2030s.

This is either the most confident infrastructure bet in corporate history, or a spectacular game of chicken. Possibly both.

Update, Oct. 27: a week on, still talks — but the filing math is public

A week on from Bloomberg's first report, no signed second deal has been announced, and Reuters' account of talks for a second facility at the Monarch campus still stands. The IPO-filing math is public — Nscale disclosed $103.4 billion of active and contracted value as of August 31, with Microsoft's agreements providing up to $43.8 billion and Anthropic's existing agreements up to about $44.6 billion (CryptoBriefing, Oct 19). A second Anthropic deal would take a single customer to roughly $90 billion of one neocloud's book. The company is seeking a New York Stock Exchange listing under the ticker NSCL at a roughly $30 billion valuation, and just secured $3.36 billion in convertible financing — led by Third Point, with $2.36 billion available immediately and another $1 billion from Nvidia arriving in mid-November, converting to equity at the IPO (TechCrunch, Sep 25). The filing's revenue line still tells the other side: first-half 2026 revenue of $140.6 million against a $1.02 billion net loss (TechCrunch).

The deal on the table: another $45bn, another 460 MW

The shape of the reported deal mirrors the one Anthropic signed in August: four GPU services agreements worth roughly $44.6 billion in aggregate payments, according to Nscale's IPO filing — about 460 MW of capacity over six years, built around Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems at Monarch. That deal was structured in four tranches with multiyear service terms. A second building of the same scale would roughly double Anthropic's footprint on one West Virginia campus.

There is a caveat buried in that filing that matters enormously for the new talks. Nscale disclosed that it had not yet secured binding financing commitments for the GPU equipment and data centre infrastructure required under the August Anthropic agreements. Enormous contracted demand, in other words, does not by itself pay for the chips, the buildings, or the gas turbines. As Data Center Frontier put it when the filing landed, contracts of this magnitude "increasingly represent the beginning of the infrastructure challenge rather than its conclusion."

So the obvious question: if Nscale hadn't financed the first $45 billion block when the new talks began, who is expected to finance the second? That is the question hanging over every neocloud in America right now, and it's why CoreWeave's share price fell apart last week.

Nscale's $103bn backlog is impressive. Its revenue isn't.

Nscale's origin story is the kind of thing that makes Silicon Valley feel slow. Founded in 2024 by Josh Payne — The Times dryly notes he is 33, Australian, and running a company with a $103 billion contract book — spun out of Arkon Energy, with Sheryl Sandberg and Sir Nick Clegg on the board. In two and a half years it grew total contracted value from $100 million to more than $103 billion, competing with Nebius, Crusoe and Lambda.

The IPO filing, submitted on September 18 with plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NSCL, tells the less flattering half. Revenue for the first six months of 2026 was $140.6 million, up from $10.4 million a year earlier — real growth, but the net loss widened to about $1.02 billion. Roughly 85 per cent of that $103.4 billion backlog sits with two customers: Anthropic at $44.6 billion and Microsoft at $43.8 billion. And as of late August, only about $2.6 billion of the total was actually operational — roughly two and a half per cent. The company was running about 25,000 active GPUs against 461,000 classified as active or under contract.

We cross-checked the key figures — $103.4bn backlog, $44.6bn Anthropic, $2.6bn operational — across four independent reports; they agree to the decimal. Which makes the analyst verdict from Zubiqo Intelligence hard to argue with: with barely any of the backlog billing yet, Nscale is selling construction timelines and gas plant permits rather than existing cloud capacity.

The IPO pricing tells you how the market is voting. Nscale is targeting a valuation of roughly $30–35 billion and aiming to raise up to $3 billion — but Bloomberg reports some investors have pushed back, suggesting $16–19 billion would be more attractive. In September the company raised $3.36 billion in pre-IPO convertible notes led by Third Point, with Apollo, Citadel, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council and a further $1 billion from Nvidia. Those notes convert into equity at a discount to the IPO price, capped at a $30 billion valuation. Translation: the smart money is buying downside protection, not upside euphoria.

"We have public market ambitions, and execution is an enormous focus of mine," Josh Payne, Nscale's chief executive, said in September. He has a point — execution is the entire trade here. Nothing about this company's valuation rests on what it has built. All of it rests on what it can build, on time, with power attached.

Monarch: a 2,250-acre bet on gas turbines and Nvidia chips

Photo: An enterprise data centre in Houston, Texas — American campuses like this are the physical shape of the AI buildout (illustrative). Credit: Tony Webster / Flickr via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

To understand why Anthropic would double down on one campus, you have to understand what Monarch is supposed to become. Nscale acquired the roughly 2,250-acre site in Mason County, West Virginia, in March 2026. The plan: more than 8 GW of gross power capacity, with an initial 2 GW of gross generation supporting about 1.37 GW of IT load, targeted for the first half of 2028. Power comes from fast-response natural gas generator sets supplied by Caterpillar — behind-the-meter generation, so the campus doesn't have to wait for the grid. Nscale estimates the whole project at roughly $70 billion, including a 2 GW gas power plant.

It is, in effect, a private power station with a data centre attached — which is increasingly the only way to build AI infrastructure at this scale in America. The grid can't keep up. Microsoft alone has committed to 1.35 GW at Monarch for its own Vera Rubin deployments, with agreements worth about $43.8 billion running through 2033.

Anthropic, for its part, isn't putting all its chips on West Virginia. The lab has been buying compute the way a panicked shopper buys tinned food before a storm: a $19 billion, 401-MW lease with TeraWulf in Kentucky, a roughly $35 billion deal with Lambda for a 350-MW data centre in Texas, a $50 billion partnership with Fluidstack, a $200 billion agreement with Google, up to 5 GW of AWS capacity, Google TPUs, Broadcom infrastructure, and even its first Australian lease — a proposed 2.16-GW inference campus near Brisbane. The second Nscale building would make Monarch the single largest commitment in that sprawling portfolio. Barely.

The worst possible week for this news

Timing is everything, and this timing is terrible — which is exactly why it's interesting. Last week, CoreWeave's shares cratered on concern about its $50 billion debt load, dragging AI infrastructure stocks down globally and fuelling exactly the "debt-driven AI expansion" scrutiny that now shadows every neocloud. Australian operator Firmus abandoned its IPO entirely for lack of demand.

Meanwhile Anthropic itself is heading into the most scrutinised tech listing in years. At a closed-door investor day at its San Francisco headquarters on October 14 — CEO Dario Amodei and CFO Krihsna Rao faced the room themselves, no intermediaries — the company reported third-quarter revenue of $16.8 billion, up 45% from the previous quarter, and said it was profitable on an adjusted basis with positive quarterly cash flow. Solid numbers by any normal standard. But the growth rate had slowed from the second quarter, when revenue more than doubled to $11.6 billion, and some investors walked out of the room discussing a $1.5 trillion valuation instead of the roughly $2 trillion previously expected for the November share sale. Reuters, citing four people familiar with the matter, called it a bellwether for the whole AI trade.

So here's the picture: investors are marking down what the AI lab is worth, while the AI lab is negotiating to mark up what it spends on infrastructure. That contradiction is the debt-fuelled infrastructure spree we've been tracking reaching its logical extreme — demand for compute keeps compounding while the financing layer creaks louder every week.

Whether Nscale can convert $103 billion of contracted paper into operating megawatts — financed, permitted, powered and cooled, on the schedules embedded in these deals — will decide not just its IPO but the market's willingness to keep funding the neocloud model at all. If Monarch delivers, the believers were right and the sceptics look colossally silly. If it slips the way Norway slipped, or Loughton slipped, the whole edifice reprices at once. There is no middle outcome at this leverage. That is what makes the second $45 billion bet so audacious: it concentrates the risk further, in the one company, on the one campus, at the exact moment the market started asking what happens if the buildout stalls.

Microsoft's ghost is in the room

The uncomfortable backdrop to all of this is what happened at Loughton. Days ago — as we reported this week — Microsoft pulled out of anchoring Nscale's flagship UK data centre in Essex after power connection delays pushed its expected supply date into the 2030s. The site was meant to create 500 construction jobs and 250 operating roles; UK Power Networks confirmed that projects like it are queuing behind works on the national transmission grid that the distributor doesn't even own.

Microsoft insists this is a blip, not a break. The Loughton site was a small share of its $103 billion of contracted revenue with Nscale, which spans Portugal, Norway and the US — and Jon Tinter, Microsoft's president of business development and ventures, recently called Nscale "an ideal partner" with "deep expertise in providing AI infrastructure services at scale." Fair enough. But the pattern is getting hard to ignore: Norway's Glomfjord facility is six months behind schedule — 6.4 MW running against a 30 MW target, with cooling-system leaks, building delays and a fire — and now the UK flagship has lost its anchor tenant to the grid queue.

And yet Nvidia keeps doubling down. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's co-founder and chief executive, told a London audience during Trump's state visit that Nscale "could be a national champion for the UK," then reiterated at an event last week that it "could be the most valuable UK start-up they have created in the last ten years." Nvidia is supplier, customer and shareholder all at once: more than $2 billion invested, a $1.2 billion capacity lease, GPUs on every rack, even an $860 million guarantee on Nscale's Texas lease obligations. When the chipmaker financing the neocloud is also the neocloud's biggest cheerleader, you get the circular magic — and the circular risk — of the entire AI buildout in one company.

Anthropic–Nscale deal FAQ

Is the second Nscale–Anthropic deal confirmed?

No. Bloomberg reported on October 19, citing people familiar with the negotiations, that talks are ongoing and details could change. Neither company commented, and Reuters said it could not independently verify the report. Treat it as advanced negotiations, not a signed contract.

How big is the Monarch campus?

About 2,250 acres in Mason County, West Virginia, planned for more than 8 GW of gross power capacity — with an initial 2 GW of on-site gas generation supporting roughly 1.37 GW of IT load, targeted for the first half of 2028. The reported second Anthropic building would add 460 MW on Nvidia Vera Rubin chips.

What are Nvidia Vera Rubin chips?

Nvidia's next-generation AI chips, which Nscale plans to deploy at Monarch in its Vera Rubin NVL72 systems. The August Anthropic agreement's chip deployments were expected to start coming online late next year, according to trade-press reports. Detailed public specifications remain limited.

Why are investors pushing back on Nscale's IPO?

Three reasons: customer concentration (Microsoft and Anthropic are ~85% of the $103.4bn backlog), execution (only ~$2.6bn operational, Norway six months late, Loughton lost its anchor), and financing (the August Anthropic deal lacked binding financing commitments at filing). Some investors reportedly want the $30–35bn target cut to $16–19bn.

What's happening to AI infrastructure stocks?

CoreWeave's shares slumped last week on concern over its $50bn debt load, dragging the sector down; Firmus abandoned its IPO; and investors are scrutinising every debt-funded buildout. Anthropic's own IPO valuation debate — $1.5tn discussed versus $2tn expected — is the bellwether everyone is watching.

Sources: Reuters; Bloomberg (via Reuters); Data Center Frontier; Data Centre Dynamics; The Times; computing.co.uk; Zubiqo Intelligence; TokenPost. Anthropic and Nscale did not respond to requests for comment at the time of the original Bloomberg report.

By Daniel Rao, New York — with reporting by the TechPulse USA newsroom

Daniel Rao is TechPulse USA's editor. He covers the collision between the AI buildout and the physical world — grids, suburbs, and the people who live in them.