Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, will spend $45 billion over the next six years to lease data center computing capacity from AI cloud infrastructure company Nscale. The agreement covers approximately 460 megawatts of power capacity at Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia. This amount of power is sufficient to meet the simultaneous electricity demand of about 345,000 U.S. households. The infrastructure will utilize Nvidia Vera Rubin chips, with operations expected to begin gradually in late 2027. This strategic agreement supports Anthropic's expanding demands for model training, inference, and commercial services. The deal marks the latest in a series of substantial compute commitments by Anthropic as it prepares for an anticipated initial public offering (IPO). Nscale's Monarch campus has a planned total capacity of approximately 1.35 gigawatts. Nscale expects to invest about $71 billion in its development, including around $47 billion for the purchase of AI chips. Anthropic's agreement covers the first building to be constructed at the campus, with remaining buildings projected to begin providing computing capacity starting in 2028. The West Virginia project was initially intended for Microsoft, which signed a letter of intent with Nscale in March to reserve capacity. However, Microsoft exited the project this summer, making Anthropic the subsequent tenant. For Nscale, securing Anthropic as a long-term tenant provides a substantial revenue base, bolstering its large-scale data center construction and preparations for a potential U.S. IPO. Nscale, a British cloud startup, is also developing data centers in Norway. Anthropic has been aggressively expanding its computing power resources in recent years. This includes other significant deals, such as a reported $50 billion with Fluidstack, $10 billion with Volta Infra Holdings, and $45 billion with SpaceX. SpaceX's IPO filing indicated that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for compute capacity from SpaceX's Colossus and Colossus II AI training data center clusters. In July, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced plans to sell Anthropic tens of billions of dollars' worth of AI servers and committed to invest up to $5 billion in the company. The scale of this commitment reflects the intensifying competition for power, advanced AI accelerators, and AI-ready data center capacity. For Anthropic, reserving this capacity early can reduce exposure to future shortages as rival model developers and enterprise customers compete for hardware. The agreement also illustrates a shift in the cloud market, with a focus on operators capable of assembling large, shared accelerator clusters. Anthropic has projected 2028 revenues of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, a significant increase from its current $47 billion revenue "run rate." The company is reportedly targeting a valuation of about $2 trillion in its IPO and anticipates potential revenues of more than $30 trillion. Nscale aims to raise as much as $3 billion in its own IPO, which could occur as early as September. Nscale's founder, Josh Payne, stated in May that AI represents "the fourth industrial revolution" and is "leading to the largest infrastructure buildout in human history." While Anthropic is making a long-term commitment in a rapidly evolving market, Nscale faces execution challenges related to construction, grid access, cooling, networking, and hardware deployment. Any delays could affect when the contracted capacity becomes available. Anthropic declined to comment on the Nscale deal.