Anthropic and Nscale in talks on a second $45 billion compute deal, Reuters says

What was reported

Anthropic is in talks to rent another roughly $45 billion of AI computing capacity from Nscale, the NVIDIA-backed data centre developer, Reuters reported on 19 October 2026, citing a person familiar with the matter. Bloomberg News first reported the talks. Anthropic did not immediately respond to Reuters, and Reuters said discussions were ongoing and details could change.

According to Reuters' source, the new deal would cover a second building at Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia, delivering 460 megawatts of computing power on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin chips. Anthropic also holds a right of first refusal on Monarch's expected third building, the person said.

Reuters added that Bloomberg also reported a group of investors had urged Anthropic to lower its IPO valuation target after a run of market setbacks for AI companies. Last week shares of Nscale rival CoreWeave slumped over its roughly $50 billion debt load, helping trigger a broad sell-off in AI stocks.

The deal Anthropic already signed

The talks build on a deal that is already on paper. Nscale's Form S-1, the registration statement it filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 18 September 2026 ahead of a planned New York Stock Exchange listing under the ticker NSCL, says that on 25 August 2026 it signed a series of GPU services agreements with Anthropic providing for aggregate payments of up to approximately $44.6 billion.

The prospectus describes four separate agreements, each between Anthropic and a wholly owned Nscale subsidiary. Nscale will provide dedicated GPU infrastructure at the Monarch campus built around NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale systems, in four tranches. Each tranche has a multi-year service term that starts when Anthropic accepts it, with extension options at Anthropic's choice.

The $44.6 billion is a ceiling, not booked revenue. Payments depend on Nscale meeting delivery and service availability requirements, and the filing lists unusually tough terms. Delays are excused only when caused by industry-wide supply constraints on the GPU systems, and only if Nscale placed binding orders with its supplier in time. If a tranche arrives too late, Anthropic can cancel it without liability, and it can also walk away if monthly uptime stays below set thresholds. Nscale calls these service levels more stringent than in any of its other customer contracts.

The financing is not in place yet

The most striking line in the filing is about money. Nscale must use best efforts to obtain qualifying financing for the GPUs and data centre infrastructure within a set period after signing. As of the date of the prospectus, it says, it had not obtained binding commitments for any of the financings required to perform under the Anthropic agreements, and all of them remained in process.

Nscale says it is developing a plan with multiple financing sources and warns there is no assurance it will raise the money on acceptable terms or at all. A second deal of similar size would add to the amount of capital the company has to find before Anthropic pays for any of it.

That is why the talks land in a nervous market. Investors are already questioning how much debt AI infrastructure can carry; Gartner recently warned that $3.5 trillion of AI infrastructure spending could face impairment by 2030, and CoreWeave's debt has become a sector-wide worry.

The Monarch campus

Nscale got the site by buying AIPCorp on 31 March 2026. The S-1 describes the Monarch Compute Campus in Mason County, West Virginia, as an approximately 2,250-acre site that Nscale believes will be one of the first state-certified AI micro-grids in the United States.

The company says the site has a power runway scalable to more than 8 gigawatts of gross capacity. The first 2 gigawatts of gross power, or 1.37 gigawatts of IT load, is expected online in the first half of 2028, with expansion to about 8 gigawatts planned for 2031. The 460 megawatts Reuters attributes to a second building would be one slice of that plan.

Across its whole business, Nscale said that as of 31 August 2026 it had about 25,000 active GPUs and 461,000 active and contracted GPUs, with roughly 1.37 gigawatts of active and contracted capacity at sites in places including Norway, Portugal, Iceland and the United States.

Nscale's numbers behind the headlines

The prospectus shows a company growing fast from a small base. Nscale reported revenue of $140.6 million for the six months to 30 June 2026, up 1,252 percent from $10.4 million a year earlier, and $33.0 million for all of 2025. Its net loss for the first half of 2026 was $1.02 billion, and adjusted EBITDA was minus $199.2 million.

Customer concentration is high. The largest customer accounted for 52 percent of first-half 2026 revenue and 73 percent in 2025. Separately, Nscale signed statements of work with Microsoft between September 2025 and April 2026 worth up to about $43.8 billion through December 2033, and it says it expects Microsoft and Anthropic to be significant customers.

Remaining performance obligations, contracted revenue not yet recognised, stood at $56.4 billion on 30 June 2026, up from $34.5 billion at the end of 2025, to be recognised over about seven years. That June figure predates the Anthropic agreements signed in August. Reuters put Nscale's total contracted value at more than $103 billion.

Microsoft's exit and the IPO

The Anthropic talks follow a setback on the Microsoft side. As AI Lookout reported, Microsoft pulled out of anchoring Nscale's planned Loughton data centre in Essex after power connection delays pushed the expected supply date into the 2030s. The S-1, filed before that news, does not say how much of the $43.8 billion Microsoft figure was tied to Loughton, and AI Lookout has not seen an updated filing.

For a company preparing to go public, a second large Anthropic contract would help replace that lost anchor and diversify a backlog that depends on a handful of very large buyers. It would also deepen that dependence on one customer and on Nscale's ability to finance and build Monarch on schedule.

What it says about Anthropic

For Anthropic, the talks fit a pattern of locking in capacity years ahead. Days earlier it leased its first Canadian data centre at Point Tupper, Nova Scotia, and the Monarch capacity would run on NVIDIA's next-generation Vera Rubin systems. The reported push from investors to lower its IPO valuation target comes as Anthropic prepares for a listing; it recently committed 5 percent of its shares to a public benefit fund.

Contracts like these are also structured to protect the buyer. Under the signed agreements, Anthropic pays only once each tranche is accepted and can cancel late tranches without liability, so much of the construction and financing risk sits with Nscale.

What is not known

No term sheet or filing for the second deal is public, and the $45 billion value, the 460 megawatt figure and the right of first refusal all come from an unnamed source cited by Reuters and from Bloomberg's report, which AI Lookout could not read. Pricing per GPU-hour, delivery dates for either deal and the lenders Nscale is talking to are not disclosed.

What would change the picture: a signed agreement disclosed in an amended S-1, confirmation from either company, binding financing commitments for the first Monarch building, or an IPO pricing that shows how public investors value these contracts.