Nscale Is Pitching Anthropic a Second $45 Billion Deal Before Financing the First

Nscale, the Nvidia-backed data-center developer that signed one of the largest AI compute deals on record just two months ago, is reportedly back at the table with the same customer for another one roughly the same size. Bloomberg News reported October 19th, in an account Reuters said it could not independently verify, that Nscale is negotiating a second agreement with Anthropic worth about $45 billion. The new deal would cover a second building at Nscale's Monarch data-center campus in West Virginia, delivering another 460 megawatts of capacity built around Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips. Anthropic would also get a right of first refusal on a third Monarch building Nscale has yet to build. Discussions are still fluid and the terms could change before anything is signed.

The scale of the ask only makes sense against how fast Anthropic has been buying compute all year. The first Monarch agreement, confirmed by TechCrunch in late August, was itself $45 billion over six years for 460 megawatts, with Vera Rubin hardware expected to start coming online in late 2027. That came on top of an April deal adding roughly 5 gigawatts of Amazon capacity, an expanded Google and Broadcom arrangement the same month, a $5 billion AMD agreement in July, a reported $1.25 billion-a-month SpaceX data-center arrangement in May, and a $10 billion, six-year deal for Norwegian capacity from a company called Volta in August. Nscale itself has grown from $100 million in contracted value to more than $103 billion in about two and a half years, a trajectory it is leaning on heavily as it prepares a U.S. listing targeting a valuation near $30 billion. A second Anthropic commitment the size of the first would roughly double Nscale's single biggest customer relationship before that IPO even prices.

The Financing Nscale Hasn't Lined Up

What the wire reports on the new talks leave out is sitting in Nscale's own September IPO prospectus. The filing put total contracted and active contract value at $103.4 billion as of August 31st — but active contract value, the portion actually generating revenue today, at just $2.6 billion. Microsoft's agreements provide for payments of up to $43.8 billion through December 2033, and Anthropic's for up to $44.6 billion, in both cases contingent on Nscale actually delivering capacity and keeping it running. Data Center Knowledge reported, citing that same prospectus, that as of its filing date Nscale had not secured binding financing for the GPU equipment and supporting infrastructure the first Anthropic agreement requires. In other words, the backlog that Nscale is using to justify both its IPO valuation and a second nine-figure Anthropic commitment rests substantially on capacity whose hardware isn't yet paid for.

"Capacity that isn't energized generates no revenue, but the costs keep running." — Alex Cordovil, analyst, on neocloud buildout risk

Microsoft Already Walked Away From One Site

The financing gap isn't Nscale's only exposure, and a second, separate episode broke within the same 48 hours. Microsoft terminated its contract for a different Nscale AI campus, in Loughton, England, after the Guardian reported that UK Power Networks told the company it couldn't deliver enough electricity to the site until the early-to-mid 2030s — years after the project's planned opening as a 50-to-90-megawatt campus with more than 23,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs earmarked for Azure. Nscale says the site is unaffected contractually with Microsoft elsewhere and that it's exploring alternative power sources, but the company hasn't disclosed what it spent on Loughton or whether termination penalties apply. Data Center Knowledge's reporting quotes analysts framing neoclouds like Nscale as structurally more exposed than hyperscalers to exactly this kind of failure: concentrated customers, debt-financed GPU purchases tied to specific sites, and capital costs that start accruing long before a grid connection — or a revenue stream — materializes.

None of that is unique to Nscale. Hyperscaler capital spending on AI infrastructure is on pace to exceed $700 billion in 2026, and investors have grown visibly twitchier about how much of that buildout is funded with debt rather than cash flow — a worry that hit CoreWeave's stock hard just weeks ago over its own leverage. What's unusual here is the compression: a company whose own prospectus flags unfinanced GPU commitments for deal one, and whose other marquee customer just proved that signed contracts don't guarantee delivered power, is simultaneously trying to close a deal twice that size with a single AI lab. If Anthropic's compute appetite keeps outrunning the generation and transmission capacity needed to actually energize it, the next binding constraint on frontier-model scaling won't be chip supply or even dollars committed on paper — it will be how fast anyone can get a substation built.