Anthropic in talks for second $45bn Nscale lease at West Virginia campus

Anthropic is in talks to lease 460MW more at Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia, in a contract that could be worth up to $45 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar. The report, relayed by Data Center Dynamics, describes a second building at the under-development site, capacity built around Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, and a right of first refusal for Anthropic on a third building. The terms rest on a single unnamed source and have not been confirmed by either company.

Anthropic signed a $45 billion, 460MW agreement at Monarch in August 2026, so the new lease would take its committed capacity at the site to 920MW. Nscale bought the 2,250-acre site in March 2026. Monarch is planned for up to 8GW, with a 2GW first phase targeted for the first half of 2028, powered by Caterpillar G3500 fast-response natural gas generator sets. Microsoft has signed for 1.35GW there, with Nscale building a large-scale GPU deployment on Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems.

Signed and reported capacity at Monarch would total 2.27GW, a little over a quarter of the 8GW the site could eventually hold. At the top end, the reported $45 billion contract works out to roughly $98 million per megawatt of contracted capacity.

The commitments sit far ahead of what Nscale operates today: its September IPO prospectus listed five active data centres totalling 55MW, with 12 in development. As this publication reported on 16 October, Nscale's Glomfjord site in Norway is six months behind schedule, with 6.4MW of a planned 30MW operational, according to a Bloomberg report relayed by Data Center Dynamics.

The report also says Microsoft pulled out of one of its capacity deals with Nscale earlier this week because of issues with the UK's grid connection queue.