Anthropic is in advanced talks to rent about $45 billion of computing power from Nscale, the Nvidia-backed data center developer, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, Oct. 19, 2026, citing people familiar with the negotiations. The deal would cover a second building at Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia, with 460 megawatts of capacity running Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips.

A deal could be finalized within days, but talks are ongoing and terms could change, according to the report, which was carried by Reuters and Investing.com. Representatives for Nscale and Anthropic declined to comment, Bloomberg reported.

What's already on the table

  • Anthropic already has infrastructure agreements with Nscale worth as much as $44.6 billion, according to a regulatory filing for Nscale's planned IPO, Investing.com reported.
  • Anthropic also has a right of first refusal on a planned third building at the campus, Bloomberg reported.
  • Nscale is seeking a valuation of roughly $30 billion in its U.S. IPO, and a second Anthropic contract could strengthen that pitch, Investing.com wrote.

The talks come a day after Microsoft pulled out of Nscale's planned Loughton data centre in Essex over UK grid delays. Nscale said that issue had no impact on its other contracts.

Why Musk watchers should care

Anthropic is also one of SpaceX's biggest compute customers. In SpaceX's IPO paperwork in May, the company disclosed that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for capacity on the Colossus clusters, nearly $45 billion in total, with either side able to end the deal on 90 days' notice, Bloomberg and Reuters reported at the time. Musk later called it "a 180 day lease with 90 day notice mutual cancellation thereafter," TechCrunch reported.

On Sunday evening (Pacific time), Musk posted on X about the other side of the market: "This describes the conversation SpaceX has had when we have tried to rent inference compute from AWS, GCP or anyone at, so that we can shift load off our training clusters!!" SpaceX reports its third-quarter results on Tuesday; see our preview of what Tesla shareholders should watch, and our earlier report on Anthropic's $16.8 billion Q3 revenue.