Anthropic begins marketing its IPO next week. The figure investors keep returning to is the $895.4 billion it has committed to spend on compute and infrastructure. Several of the companies supplying that capacity haven’t yet secured the financing to build it.
One of them is Nscale, an AI cloud provider seeking to go public at a valuation of up to $35 billion. Anthropic has agreed to spend up to $44.6 billion with Nscale for computing power from the first building of a planned campus in West Virginia, which will run Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips. The two companies are also discussing a second deal worth roughly $45 billion for another building.
Nscale had about 25,000 advanced AI chips running in August, a small fraction of the nearly 500,000 it plans to deploy. Building the West Virginia campus will take financing for both the chips and the data center. Nscale hasn’t announced any lenders for it yet.
Nscale isn’t the only Anthropic supplier still lining up what it needs. Anthropic’s contract with Lambda, another neocloud, requires a data center lease that isn’t in place yet.
Together, Nscale and Lambda account for less than half of the commitments Anthropic has flagged as conditional or cancellable. One of its largest suppliers has also signed a five-year GPU lease, while Anthropic can exit that supplier’s contracts much sooner.