Anthropic and Nscale are in talks over a second compute deal worth about $45 billion: on October 19, 2026, Reuters cited a person familiar with the matter saying Nscale wants to sell Anthropic, the maker of Claude, a second building at its Monarch data center campus in West Virginia, delivering roughly 460 megawatts on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin chips; Bloomberg first reported the discussions. The status matters: these are still talks, the details could change, and Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment, so this should not be read as a signed order.
The first deal is barely cold, the second is already on the table
The pair's first deal of the same size came in August 2026, when Anthropic committed about $45 billion to rent compute at the Monarch campus. If a second deal lands on similar terms, Anthropic's commitments at this single campus approach $90 billion, and it also holds a right of first refusal on the campus's expected third building. Nscale's own growth is just as steep: founded in Britain about two and a half years ago, its contracted value has climbed from $100 million to more than $103 billion, and its prospectus expects Microsoft and Anthropic to be its major future customers. This site previously reported Microsoft walking away from an Nscale project in Essex; the same supplier losing one anchor customer while another doubles down is now a normal pattern in the compute market.
Why the market did not simply applaud this time
Unlike a few months ago, investors' first reaction to the news was a frown. Nscale is pursuing a listing amid reports of pushback against its proposed $30 billion valuation, and Bloomberg has also reported that a group of investors urged Anthropic to lower its own IPO valuation target. The immediate trigger was last week's slump in CoreWeave shares over its roughly $50 billion debt load, which dragged AI stocks down globally: markets have started separating how much compute a company has signed from whether those contracts turn into profit. Microsoft's reason for leaving Nscale's flagship project was equally concrete: power connection delays pushed expected supply into the 2030s. What stalls these deals is rarely demand; it is electricity, substations and grid queues.
The bill lands on power prices and utilization
Anthropic's logic for locking in more compute is easy to follow: at the frontier, competition becomes a contest over who holds megawatts that actually switch on in time, and OpenAI racing to raise $30 billion is the same game played differently. But 460 megawatts is roughly a mid-sized city's consumption, and if the second building slips, Vera Rubin supply lags, or Anthropic's revenue growth fails to cover the rent curve, a $90 billion commitment flips from moat to fixed cost. Until a formal announcement arrives, this round of talks is best read as a gauge: it measures how much of AI infrastructure's forward story capital markets are still willing to fund.
