Anthropic continues compute-gobbling streak in $45 billion deal with Nscale

Anthropic has agreed to rent approximately $45 billion in AI computing capacity from Nscale, a British AI infrastructure company that was founded in 2024, according to a person familiar with the deal. The agreement will see Nscale supply Anthropic with computing power built around Nvidia's Vera Rubin chip system, which combines six different chips and is considered a cutting-edge design in the industry. The new capacity is expected to begin supporting Anthropic's services in late 2027. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg, spans six years and will draw computing from Nscale's flagship data center in West Virginia.

This agreement is the latest in a series of large compute partnerships Anthropic has signed over the past eight months as it seeks to compete with rivals such as OpenAI. Earlier this month, Anthropic signed a $10 billion deal with Volta, an AI cloud startup founded in January, securing a six-year supply of cloud computing from a data center in Norway. In July, Anthropic also signed a $5 billion compute-related deal with AMD.

In May, Anthropic revealed a large computing deal with SpaceX, the company run by Elon Musk, whose rivalry with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made him an unlikely ally of Anthropic. That arrangement draws capacity from two different SpaceX data centers and is reportedly providing Anthropic with $1.25 billion worth of computing capacity each month. In April, Anthropic signed a deal to significantly expand its partnership with Amazon, gaining access to an additional 5 gigawatts of compute, and also expanded its relationships with Google and Broadcom to add even more power capacity.

Anthropic is not alone in its aggressive pursuit of compute. Other major players in the AI field, including Google, OpenAI, and Meta, are following a similar path, racing to secure as much computing capacity as possible. Nscale, despite being a young company, has already established deals with clients like Microsoft, according to the source. The growing demand for AI horsepower across the industry is driving these large-scale infrastructure agreements, with companies locking in long-term capacity to support their models and services.

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