On October 20, 2026, CNBC cited a source familiar with the matter reporting that AI research lab Anthropic is in talks with next-generation cloud infrastructure provider Nscale over a second compute leasing agreement, with an estimated value that could reach up to $45 billion.
The contract reportedly covers a second 460-megawatt (MW) data center located on the same campus where the two companies signed their first deal in August 2026 in the U.S. state of West Virginia. Anthropic declined to comment on the report.
Neocloud providers face mounting debt pressure
Backed by chipmaker Nvidia, UK-headquartered Nscale is one of the prominent names in the “neocloud” wave—companies that specialize in building or leasing dedicated data centers to resell computing capacity to major tech corporations. The company also filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in September 2026 under the ticker NSCL.
However, these massive negotiations are taking place against the backdrop of a noticeable shift in financial market sentiment regarding the heavily debt-financed business model used to acquire server chips.
Over the past month alone, shares of two major listed competitors in the same segment, CoreWeave and Nebius, have fallen 28% and 27%, respectively. Wall Street investors are increasingly concerned that interest expenses and fixed asset depreciation will wipe out all operating profits for these businesses before the data centers can reach stable operations.
Grid power bottlenecks and the infrastructure expansion dilemma
Nscale itself is also confronting practical obstacles in its expansion drive. On October 18, 2026, The Telegraph reported that Microsoft decided to withdraw from an agreement to serve as an anchor tenant at an Nscale data center outside London, after the project suffered severe delays in connecting to the UK’s national power grid.
An Nscale representative stated that the company remains committed to the project and is pursuing alternative power sources, while maintaining that the London setback will not affect its other contracts. Nevertheless, the incident reflects a broader challenge confronting the entire AI industry: capital and processors can be deployed rapidly, but stringing high-voltage transmission lines and clearing regulatory hurdles with local authorities often take years.
For Anthropic, the pressure to secure compute capacity remains alarming. The company has acknowledged that surging demand for its Claude model family has created unprecedented infrastructure strain. To avoid falling behind in the race to develop next-generation model systems, the company has continually signed compute agreements with major hardware and cloud partners, including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), SpaceX, Google, and Broadcom.
The new deal between Anthropic and Nscale underscores that the appetite for computing power to support frontier models shows no sign of cooling down. However, as infrastructure providers grapple simultaneously with costly debt burdens and real-world electrical grid delays, fulfilling commitments worth tens of billions of dollars will prove far more difficult than the projections on paper suggest.