Anthropic Is in Talks for Another $45 Billion AI Deal. Nvidia Could Be a Big Winner.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is reportedly in talks with the British neocloud provider Nscale to expand an already massive compute deal, adding roughly $45 billion in contract value as both companies prepare to go public in the coming months.

Anthropic's Nscale deal could reach $90 billion

CNBC reported this morning that the frontier AI lab is in talks to rent computing capacity in a second building at Monarch, Nscale's data center campus in West Virginia. The deal would see Anthropic tap an additional 460 megawatts of compute capacity from Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin chips and would provide the company a right of first refusal on a planned third Monarch building.

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While the deal has not closed, the proposed agreement would bring Anthropic's total Nscale commitment to roughly $90 billion.

Nscale's growth comes with major customer risks

Backed by Nvidia, Nscale is a rapidly growing "neocloud" -- essentially a smaller, leaner, AI-focused version of a traditional hyperscaler. It filed for a U.S. IPO in September.

Of course, that growth comes with a couple of pretty substantial asterisks. Just two companies account for roughly 85% of the company's contract value: Microsoft and Anthropic. That is an extreme level of customer concentration.

And Microsoft recently walked away from a planned Nscale data center in Loughton, England, after power connection delays pushed expected electricity availability into the 2030s. Microsoft reassured investors that the trouble was contained to the specific site and its other commitments remained intact, but it's a stark reminder of just how fragile Nscale's position is and how little leverage it has with the much bigger fish it relies on.

Anthropic's IPO puts its spending under scrutiny

The proposed expansion also comes as Anthropic prepares for what could be the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history. Potentially bigger than the recent record-setting SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) IPO. Anthropic is reportedly targeting a November listing with a valuation between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion, although a firm date hasn't been set.

According to Reuters, which reviewed Anthropic's draft IPO prospectus, revenue reached roughly $4.6 billion in 2025, about 12 times its 2024 level, but Q3 sales were recently reported to have reached $16.8 billion, up 45% from the previous quarter.

Of course, it takes a lot of capital to scale a business like this, and delivering that growth is expensive. Anthropic spent $7.33 billion on computing and infrastructure in 2025 and recorded an operating loss of more than $8 billion. Over the next decade, Anthropic is committed to spending over $500 billion on deals just like this one.

The company has said it reached positive adjusted profit in the second quarter. That's an encouraging sign, but until its full, audited financials are released, I would take that claim with a major grain of salt. What exactly "adjusted" means is crucial.

The Nscale expansion is worth paying attention to. It's a big potential contract that would provide the computing power Anthropic needs to grow. It also adds another enormous commitment to an already enormous list of commitments Anthropic has to fund somehow.

Johnny Rice has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.