Nscale, a London AI infrastructure company that didn’t exist before 2024, is negotiating to sell cloud computing power to Anthropic in a deal valued at about $45 billion, according to Bloomberg.
The details
The talks, reported on October 19, 2026, center on expanding Nscale’s Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia. That site is already spoken for in a big way.
In August 2026, Anthropic signed a contract with Nscale worth approximately $44.6 billion. It covers 460 megawatts of capacity at Monarch over six years, running on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips.
For a sense of scale, 460 megawatts is enough electricity to power hundreds of thousands of US homes. The campus has room to grow into multi-gigawatt territory, which is presumably what the new negotiations are about.
Nscale’s contracted backlog stood at roughly $103.4 billion as of September 2026. Two customers dominate that pile: Microsoft, at $43.8 billion, and Anthropic, at $44.6 billion.
Together, those two deals make up approximately 85% of the total backlog.
As of late August 2026, only about $2.6 billion was operational. The overwhelming majority of Nscale’s contracted revenue depends on data centers, chips, and power that still have to show up.
Background: a young company in a hurry
Nscale was founded in 2024 and has raised over $3.7 billion from backers including Nvidia to fund its expansion.
In September 2026, Nscale filed for a US IPO, targeting a valuation of about $35 billion.
At Monarch, Nscale is building a natural gas power plant on site. Elsewhere, the company has pursued facilities powered by renewable energy and in energy-efficient locations like Norway.
Recently, Microsoft walked away from a separate Nscale data center project in the UK because power supply delays there were projected to stretch into the 2030s.
What this means
For Nscale, another roughly $45 billion contract would push its backlog well past its current level. A company targeting a valuation of about $35 billion while holding a backlog north of $100 billion is pitching investors on a very simple idea: the demand is already signed.
With only about $2.6 billion of backlog operational, Nscale is asking the market to trust its execution on a massive build-out. Investors will want to know how it plans to finance construction, how quickly capacity comes online, and what happens if timelines slip.
If two customers already account for approximately 85% of the backlog, adding another giant Anthropic contract would deepen that reliance rather than diversify it.
What to watch next: whether the Anthropic talks produce a signed contract, how Nscale describes the deal in its IPO materials, and progress on the Monarch gas plant. Any update on how much of the backlog moves from paper to operational capacity will matter more than the headline totals.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.