Anthropic has agreed to pay roughly $45 billion to rent 460 megawatts of compute capacity from Nscale at a West Virginia data center slated to open at the end of 2027, locking in access to Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips as the AI company prepares for a public listing. The agreement, confirmed by CNBC on Wednesday and first reported by Bloomberg, is structured as a long-term rental rather than a purchase, though the source material does not specify whether consideration is cash, stock, or a mix, nor does it disclose any break fees or termination conditions.
The infrastructure squeeze is real
Anthropic said earlier this year that surging demand for its Claude models had created "inevitable strain" on infrastructure, hurting reliability and performance during peak hours. Since then it has signed a string of supply agreements with Advanced Micro Devices, Elon Musk's SpaceX, Google, and Broadcom. The Nscale deal dwarfs those arrangements in headline value and represents a single-site concentration of 460 megawatts, a figure that, if delivered, would make the West Virginia campus one of the largest AI compute clusters in the world.
IPO timeline presses the valuation
The company confidentially filed its IPO prospectus with the SEC in June and has begun preliminary investor meetings. Its last private valuation stands at $965 billion, a number that now requires a credible path to the compute capacity needed to serve enterprise and consumer demand at scale. Rivals OpenAI and Google control their own infrastructure advantages; Anthropic's strategy is to lease its way to parity.
What the terms don't say
The announcement omits the rental schedule, escalation clauses, and any minimum take-or-pay commitments. It also does not state whether Anthropic has secured priority access to Vera Rubin supply or simply a place in the queue. Nscale itself is a UK-based infrastructure provider, not a chipmaker, so execution risk sits with a third party's ability to build, power, and operate a facility of this magnitude on schedule.
Watch the 2027 delivery date
Everything hinges on the West Virginia site coming online at the end of 2027. Slippage would leave Anthropic exposed to the same capacity constraints it is trying to escape, while the IPO clock keeps ticking. Investors will want to see the lease economics, the power contracts, and the contingency plan before they underwrite a $965 billion story built on rented silicon.