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

Anthropic has agreed to rent about $45 billion in AI compute from Nscale, a British infrastructure company that was founded in 2024, according to a source familiar with the deal. The supply is expected to run through Nscale’s flagship data center in West Virginia, and the compute should start coming online in late 2027.

The hardware behind it is Nvidia’s Vera Rubin system, which Nscale says uses six chips working together. That setup is supposed to represent the cutting edge of chip design, and it will feed Anthropic’s services once the capacity comes online. Bloomberg first reported the deal and said it spans six years.

This is only the latest swing in Anthropic’s compute buying spree. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion deal with Volta, an AI cloud startup founded this past January, for six years of cloud power from a data center in Norway. In July, it agreed to a $5 billion compute-related deal with AMD.

Before that came a string of bigger and stranger alliances. In May, Anthropic disclosed a large computing deal with SpaceX, which uses two SpaceX data centers and is reportedly supplying $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. In April, the company expanded its deal with Amazon and gained access to an additional 5 gigawatts of compute. It also broadened ties with Google and Broadcom that same month.

Anthropic is not being subtle about the goal here. Over the past eight months, it has pushed hard to grow its compute base so it can better compete with OpenAI. And it is not alone; Google, OpenAI, and Meta are all in the same expensive race to lock up as much AI horsepower as they can.