NScale Secures $45B Lease Deal with Anthropic Amid AI Compute Rush
Anthropic is set to lease a data center from NScale in a deal valued at $45 billion. This agreement follows other major infrastructure commitments, including a roughly $19 billion, 20-year lease with TeraWulf in Kentucky and a separate deal worth up to $16.1 billion with Riot Platforms in Texas.
This pattern of securing dedicated physical infrastructure is deliberate, as Anthropic aims to control its own compute resources rather than relying on cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, which has invested significantly in the company.
The goal is to give Anthropic's Claude models the raw computational horsepower needed for both training new systems and running inference at scale. NScale, founded in 2024 as a spinoff from Arkon Energy, a crypto mining company, has pivoted into AI infrastructure with its background in high-density power facilities.
NScale has raised a $2 billion Series C round, pushing its valuation to approximately $14.6 billion. The company acquired an 8-gigawatt compute campus in West Virginia and secured an $865 million deal for 40 megawatts of capacity at a North Carolina data center.