Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude model family, is moving to secure its computing infrastructure well into the future. According to sources familiar with the matter, the company has agreed to a massive $45 billion deal to lease AI computing power from Nscale at the latter's flagship data center campus in West Virginia.

This agreement represents one of several large-scale compute commitments Anthropic has made recently, as the company accelerates its infrastructure buildout ahead of a highly anticipated public listing. The six-year contract covers approximately 460 megawatts of power capacity, an amount roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of about 345,000 American homes simultaneously.

Under the terms of the deal, Nscale will deploy Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA)'s next-generation Vera Rubin chips to fulfill Anthropic's requirements, with the hardware expected to begin ramping into operation around the end of next year. The sheer scale of the power commitment underscores the enormous energy and infrastructure demands associated with training and running large-scale AI models.

Anthropic has emerged as one of the most significant buyers of data center capacity in the global AI market. Beyond the Nscale agreement, the company has recently signed a $50 billion partnership with AI cloud provider Fluidstack, a $10 billion compute deal with infrastructure startup Volta Infra Holdings, and a roughly $45 billion agreement with Elon Musk's SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX). These moves reflect a broader strategy to lock in long-term computing resources across multiple vendors, reducing the risk of capacity shortfalls as demand for AI services continues to surge.

The company is also drawing intense interest from capital markets. Anthropic was valued at approximately $965 billion as of May this year, and an initial public offering is expected in the near term. Reports have suggested the IPO could match or even exceed the record scale set by SpaceX, making the assurance of stable and ample compute capacity a central pillar of Anthropic's pre-listing strategy. Anthropic declined to comment on the Nscale transaction.

For London-based Nscale, securing Anthropic as a marquee tenant is a significant milestone. The company could launch its own U.S. IPO as soon as next month, with plans to raise up to $3 billion. Nscale operates in the rapidly growing "Neocloud" segment, alongside players like CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV), building data centers packed with AI accelerators and leasing the capacity to AI-focused companies.

The Anthropic lease covers the first of three buildings at Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia. Once fully developed, the entire campus is expected to deliver around 1.35 gigawatts of capacity. Planning documents indicate that building out the full site, including on-site power generation, would require roughly $71 billion in investment, with AI chips representing the largest cost component at approximately $47 billion. Servers in the remaining two buildings are slated to come online starting in 2028.

Interestingly, Anthropic was not the original tenant for this facility. Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT) signed a letter of intent with Nscale in March to reserve capacity at the planned West Virginia data center, building on an existing European partnership between the two companies. However, sources say Microsoft decided to withdraw from the West Virginia project earlier this summer, and Anthropic subsequently stepped in as the tenant. Microsoft declined to comment on the matter.

The partnership between Microsoft and Nscale remains intact, however. Nscale is currently building a large AI data center campus in Norway that will be used by Microsoft.

Beyond the enormous capital outlay, the Monarch campus is expected to have a notable impact on local employment. According to planning documents, the fully operational data center campus is projected to directly support about 645 jobs on-site, with an additional 3,600 indirect jobs created across West Virginia. The construction phase is expected to employ roughly 4,375 workers.

Nscale has told potential investors that it already holds approximately $51 billion in contracted revenue ahead of its planned listing. The company's board includes former Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: META) executive Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister who previously served as Meta's president of global affairs.