Anthropic has signed a $45 billion, 460-megawatt capacity lease at Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia, according to Bloomberg's first report of the deal. The long-term agreement gives the AI lab dedicated power infrastructure as major cloud operators compete for scarce data center capacity to train large language models.
Microsoft and Google both explored leasing capacity at the same facility before Anthropic entered talks. Microsoft signed a letter of intent in March 2026 but exited during a portfolio review over the summer. Google also withdrew after reassessing its compute requirements and capital expenditure plans. The successive exits left the 460MW block available for Anthropic's bid.
Nscale operates the Monarch campus in Appalachia, where abundant hydroelectric power and low-cost land have attracted data center investment. The West Virginia location sits near fiber corridors connecting to East Coast cloud regions, making it operationally relevant to companies running distributed training workloads.
At $45 billion across the lease term, the contract ranks among the largest infrastructure commitments in AI. Anthropic, which has raised $7 billion in venture funding and claimed $5 billion in annual revenue as of early 2026, now has dedicated capacity to scale Claude's training and inference without competing for shared cloud resources. OpenAI has pursued similar arrangements with data center operators, and Meta operates its own on-prem clusters.
The deal also shows Nscale's strategy to sell capacity long-term rather than in shorter commitments. Smaller AI labs and enterprises typically rent compute month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter; hyperscalers and frontier labs negotiate multiyear contracts to lock in power supply and amortize infrastructure costs. Anthropic's 460MW block is the largest single lease Nscale has publicly disclosed.
The Monarch campus remains under development. Nscale did not disclose total planned capacity or timeline for full buildout in its announcement. Other data center operators, including Digital Realty and Equinix, are racing to develop AI-ready infrastructure in power-abundant regions, and West Virginia has attracted multiple entrants seeking to compete on cost and energy availability.
Anthropics's lease ties up nearly a third of the 1.6GW combined compute capacity Microsoft, Google and Meta have publicly committed to bringing online in 2025-2026, based on their disclosed infrastructure spending. The three companies are also pursuing custom silicon partnerships and long-term power purchase agreements to reduce dependence on third-party data center operators. If Anthropic's deal functions as intended, it removes a major block of available capacity from the open market for the lease's full term.
