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

Anthropic’s proposed $45 billion Nscale expansion could help fuel its growth, but it also adds another enormous bill ahead of its anticipated IPO.

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.

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

Averytin News Financial update.