Anthropic in Talks for Second $45 Billion Computing Deal With Nscale, Bloomberg Reports

Since Nscale filed for a New York Stock Exchange listing on Sept. 18, and after Microsoft backed out of anchoring its flagship data center, the company has a new piece of business in play: Anthropic is in talks to buy about $45 billion in computing power from it, according to people familiar with the negotiations cited by Bloomberg on Monday, Oct. 19.

Representatives for both companies declined to comment. Bloomberg's sources said a deal could be finalized within days, though talks are ongoing and terms could change.

What is on the table

The new capacity would come from a second building at Nscale's Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia. It would deliver about 460 megawatts running on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips.

Anthropic would also hold a right of first refusal on the campus's expected third building, per the same report.

This would be Anthropic's second contract of roughly this size with Nscale in two months. An agreement struck in August covers about 460 megawatts at the same campus, with Vera Rubin systems scheduled to begin coming online in late 2027.

Nscale's IPO filing, under the ticker NSCL, puts Anthropic's existing agreements at up to about $44.6 billion.

The numbers behind Nscale

The filing shows $103.4 billion in active and contracted total contract value as of Aug. 31. Of that, Microsoft agreements provide for payments of up to $43.8 billion, and Anthropic's for up to about $44.6 billion. Both are subject to delivery and service-availability requirements.

Nscale is reportedly seeking a valuation of roughly $30 billion in the listing, according to Investing.com.

Revenue is a fraction of the contracted figure. Nscale reported first-half 2026 revenue of $140.6 million, up from $10.4 million a year earlier. It posted a net loss of $1.02 billion over the same period.

The company's prospectus names Microsoft and Anthropic as expected major future customers. That is a heavy dependence on two buyers.

Microsoft's exit and the power problem

Microsoft pulled out of a deal to anchor a flagship data center for Nscale after power connection delays pushed its expected supply date into the 2030s. The filing's $43.8 billion in Microsoft payments remains subject to delivery and service-availability requirements.

Power has been the recurring constraint. Power availability has already slowed parts of Nscale's build-out, and its flagship UK project faces grid delays projected to stretch into the 2030s.

The West Virginia expansion would shift more of Nscale's backlog to the U.S., where the first Anthropic capacity is not due until late 2027.

The financing gap

Contracts are not cash. Nscale has said it has not yet secured binding commitments for the financing needed to buy the GPUs and build the data centers its contracts require.

A second Anthropic contract would deepen Nscale's reliance on a small number of customers while adding to the capital it must raise before the revenue arrives.

Investors are already testing debt-funded AI infrastructure. CoreWeave's shares and bonds came under pressure this month over concerns about its roughly $50 billion debt load, feeding a broader AI stock selloff. Bloomberg also reported that a group of investors urged Anthropic to lower its own IPO valuation target after a string of market setbacks for AI companies.

The argument for the deal is straightforward. A second Anthropic contract would extend a backlog that grew from $100 million to more than $103 billion in two and a half years, and Nscale competes with Nebius, Crusoe and Lambda for this kind of work.

Investors will still need to judge whether the company can deliver the promised capacity and turn the backlog into cash flow, as Investing.com noted.

What comes next

If the talks close in the coming days as Bloomberg's sources indicate, the terms will matter more than the headline number: delivery milestones, service-availability conditions, and whether Nscale has lined up financing. Nscale has filed for its NYSE listing but no pricing date has been announced.