Anthropic signed a deal to rent approximately $45 billion in AI compute from Nscale, a British AI infrastructure company, according to a source familiar with the matter. Since Nscale was founded only in 2024, this agreement represents a remarkably fast rise for the young infrastructure provider, which has already struck deals with Microsoft.
Nscale will supply Anthropic with compute through NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin chips, the company’s new state-of-the-art chip system combining six different chips working in concert. Because this architecture is considered the cutting edge of current chip design, the partnership positions Anthropic among the earliest adopters of the technology. The compute capacity is expected to begin powering Anthropic’s services in late 2027.
The deal, first reported by Bloomberg, spans six years and draws computing power from Nscale’s flagship data center in West Virginia. This agreement marks only the latest addition to Anthropic’s expanding spree of compute partnerships. Over the past eight months, the company has aggressively scaled its compute capacity, aiming to better compete with rivals, most notably OpenAI.
Earlier this month, Anthropic signed a separate $10 billion deal with AI cloud startup Volta, itself founded only in January, securing six years of cloud computing power from a Norwegian data center. In July, the company signed a $5 billion compute-related deal with AMD.
A few months earlier, in May, Anthropic entered a large computing agreement with SpaceX, drawing capacity from two separate SpaceX data centers. That arrangement reportedly provides Anthropic with $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month, an unlikely alliance given Elon Musk’s rivalry with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In April, Anthropic significantly expanded its partnership with Amazon, gaining access to an additional 5 gigawatts of compute capacity. That same month, the company also expanded its relationship with Google and Broadcom, adding even more processing power to its infrastructure stack.
Nscale defines itself as a company building “the next frontier for AI.” According to them:
AI is reshaping every industry, every economy, and every human endeavor. Nscale is building the advanced infrastructure, systems and solutions that enables practitioners, enterprises, and governments across the globe to create, deploy, and scale their most transformative AI systems.
Anthropic is far from alone in pursuing AI compute so aggressively. Because the broader race to secure processing capacity continues intensifying industry-wide, other major players, including Google, OpenAI, and Meta, are following remarkably similar strategies, each racing to lock down chip supply before rivals do.
