Anthropic locks in 45-billion-dollar compute deal with Nscale ahead of IPO

Anthropic has struck a deal worth around 45 billion dollars with British cloud startup Nscale, Bloomberg reports. Over six years, the Claude maker will rent compute capacity from a data center in West Virginia. Starting late next year, Anthropic will use 460 megawatts of Nvidia's coming Vera Rubin chip generation there, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Ahead of an IPO planned for this fall, Anthropic is quickly locking in compute, including through deals with Amazon and SpaceX, plus a commitment to lease Google's AI chips for more than 150 billion dollars. It also held early talks with Meta about a possible multibillion-dollar deal.

Nscale is preparing an IPO of its own and raised 2 billion dollars in March at a valuation of 14.6 billion dollars, led by Norwegian energy company Aker. Its planned 1.35-gigawatt data center in Mason County will cost 69 billion dollars, according to Nscale, and is facing pushback from local residents.

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