Most of us hesitate over a second helping of dessert. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is reportedly lining up a second $45 billion helping of computing power.
According to Reuters, citing a Bloomberg report on 19 October, British AI infrastructure firm Nscale is in talks to sell Anthropic about $45 billion of AI computing power. Neither company has confirmed it, and the details could still change.
First, what is Nscale?
Think of Nscale as a landlord for AI brains. It builds enormous data centres, fills them with Nvidia chips and rents the computing power to the companies that train and run AI. It was only founded in 2024, yet its contracted business has reportedly ballooned from $100 million to more than $103 billion in about two and a half years.
Round two at Monarch
In August, Anthropic struck a roughly $45 billion deal to rent computing power from Nscale’s Monarch campus in West Virginia. Now Nscale is pitching a second building on the same site. Here is the rumoured shopping list:
- 460 megawatts of power, which Bloomberg said in August is roughly enough for 345,000 US homes.
- Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips.
- A right of first refusal for Anthropic on a third building, so it gets first dibs.
Add it up and Anthropic’s Nscale commitments would sit at around $90 billion on paper. Anthropic’s other reported infrastructure deals include roughly $50 billion with Fluidstack, $45 billion with SpaceX and $10 billion with Volta Infrastructure.
The Microsoft plot twist
The timing is spicy. Microsoft has pulled out of a deal to anchor a flagship Nscale data centre, after delays connecting the site to the power grid pushed its expected supply date into the 2030s. The lesson is that in the AI boom, electricity is the new gold. You can have the chips and the cash, but without a power connection you are just building a very expensive shed.
Microsoft and Anthropic together account for about 85% of Nscale’s contract value, according to its IPO filing, so losing one big customer and landing another is a very big deal for the company.
Why this matters for everyone else
Three things stand out:
- Contracts are not cash. Nscale’s filing says it has not yet secured financing for the first Anthropic contract. It also has to hit performance milestones, or Anthropic can walk away.
- Investors are jittery. Last week shares in rival CoreWeave slumped over its $50 billion debt load, helping trigger a wider sell-off in AI stocks. Bloomberg also reported that some investors want Anthropic to lower its own IPO valuation target.
- Demand is not slowing down. Whatever the markets think, the biggest AI labs are still racing to lock up computing capacity years in advance.
The AI Boom Team take
If you run a business, you will never rent 460 megawatts. But the same squeeze, with demand racing ahead of power and chips, is what will shape the price and availability of the AI tools you use every day. A second $45 billion deal would be a bet that the appetite for AI is still growing faster than the doubts. We will keep watching whether the ink dries.
Sources: Reuters and Bloomberg reporting on 19 October 2026; CNBC, 26 August 2026. This article is based on press reports of talks that have not been confirmed by the companies.
By the AI Boom Team. © aiboom.uk
