이미지: CNBC Technology · METAL LAB 편집
Summary
- Anthropic has signed a roughly $45 billion, six-year cloud computing deal with UK AI infrastructure company Nscale.
- The deal leases 460 megawatts at a data center in West Virginia and will run on NVIDIA's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, with the facility coming online in late 2027.
- It follows a string of computing deals Anthropic struck over the past eight months with Amazon, SpaceX, AMD, and Volta, and comes after the company confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the SEC in June.
Anthropic has signed a roughly $45 billion cloud computing deal with UK AI infrastructure company Nscale. Under the agreement, Anthropic will lease 460 megawatts of computing capacity for six years at a Nscale data center under construction in West Virginia. Bloomberg first reported the deal, and CNBC and TechCrunch have since confirmed the details.
Leasing 460 Megawatts in West Virginia
Under the deal, Anthropic will get its computing power from NVIDIA's next-generation chip system, Vera Rubin. It's a system that links six different chips together to work as one, and it's widely regarded as sitting at the cutting edge of chip design today. The data center itself isn't slated to come online until late 2027, so Anthropic will have to wait more than a year before it can actually put this capacity to use.
Shares of Norwegian public company Aker jumped sharply after the deal was announced. Aker said Nscale won the contract through its West Virginia "Monarch" site, and the market appears to have read that as good news.
The Fifth Major Deal in Eight Months
This isn't the first time Anthropic has bought computing power from outside partners. Back in April, it expanded its partnership with Amazon to secure an additional 5 gigawatts of computing, and that same month it broadened its ties with Google and Broadcom. In May, a deal with SpaceX had Anthropic start leasing $1.25 billion worth of computing per month across two data centers, and in July it signed a $5 billion chip-related deal with AMD. Earlier this month, Anthropic also announced a $10 billion deal with Volta — a startup founded this past January — to secure six years of computing through a Norwegian data center.
| Timing | Partner | Deal Details |
|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | Amazon | Secured an additional 5GW of computing |
| April 2026 | Google, Broadcom | Expanded existing partnerships |
| May 2026 | SpaceX | 2 data centers, $1.25B/month |
| July 2026 | AMD | $5 billion |
| Early August 2026 | Volta | Norway, $10B, 6 years |
| Late August 2026 | Nscale | West Virginia, $45B, 6 years, 460MW |
Building an In-House Chip Team While Still Expanding Outside Leasing
On August 8, Anthropic confirmed it had formed a custom silicon team to design chips specifically for Claude. At the time, the company said it would stick to a "multi-chip strategy," using its own chips alongside hardware from multiple vendors. Less than three weeks later, the Nscale deal shows just how much faster outside leasing is growing compared with the pace of in-house chip development. Designing custom chips takes time, and in the meantime, Anthropic has to fill its immediate computing needs through outside contracts.
Valuation Pressure Builds Ahead of IPO
Earlier this year, Anthropic said in a statement that surging demand had placed an "inevitable strain" on its infrastructure, affecting service stability and performance especially during peak usage hours. The company confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the SEC in June and has been holding preliminary meetings with potential investors since. According to its Series H announcement earlier this year, Anthropic's valuation stands at $965 billion — a figure it now has to justify to investors as competition from OpenAI, Google, and others intensifies. Its infrastructure strategy is likely to become a central part of the story Anthropic tells Wall Street once it goes public.
Editor's Take
Lay out Anthropic's eight months of computing deals in order and a pattern emerges. Amazon, Google, and Broadcom in April, SpaceX in May, AMD in July, then Volta and Nscale in August — that's roughly one deal every month. This isn't leisurely expansion; it's urgent procurement. A company that only stood up its in-house chip design team in early August turning around and signing a $45 billion, six-year contract by the end of the same month suggests Anthropic has a longer stretch to get through before its own hardware is ready for real-world use than it might like to admit.
For anyone building coding assistants or running API services on top of Claude, the takeaway is simple: response speed and stability could keep fluctuating from the second half of this year into next. The West Virginia data center won't actually go live until late 2027, so signing this deal today doesn't mean service quality improves anytime soon. Teams making heavy use of the Claude API would still be wise to spread batch jobs away from peak request hours.
A company preparing for an IPO stacks up computing deals this densely to show investors it already has a plan to meet demand. But execution of that plan is all pushed out to 2027 and beyond, and in the meantime OpenAI and Google are scaling up their own computing at the same pace. Don't rule out Anthropic announcing yet another infrastructure deal within the next few weeks — its eight-month track record suggests exactly that.
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