TL;DR

Nscale, the British AI data centre developer backed by Nvidia, is negotiating to sell Anthropic computing power from a second building at its Monarch campus in West Virginia, in an agreement potentially valued at around £34bn ($45bn), according to a person who spoke to Reuters on Monday 19 October. Bloomberg reported the talks first. The news follows Microsoft’s withdrawal from Nscale’s flagship site in Essex.

What the source described

Anthropic already agreed in August to spend $45bn renting capacity at the same West Virginia campus. According to Reuters’ source, the second Monarch building would provide 460 megawatts using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips, and Anthropic would hold right of first refusal on a planned third building. The person cautioned that talks were continuing and details could change. Anthropic did not respond to Reuters straight away.

Bloomberg’s report added that a group of investors had pressed Anthropic to lower the valuation it seeks at flotation, following setbacks for AI stocks.

A contrast with Essex

The talks come straight after Microsoft walked away from Loughton, the London-based company’s planned Essex datacentre, which the Guardian says ministers had hailed as the country’s largest. Reuters says Microsoft pulled out after delays connecting to the grid left the Essex site unlikely to get power before the 2030s. The same company is now discussing tens of billions of dollars of new capacity on a US campus.

Nscale has lifted contracted value from $100m (about £75m) to more than $103bn (about £77bn) in two and a half years, Reuters reports, and its prospectus names Microsoft and Anthropic as expected major customers. It competes with Nebius, Crusoe and Lambda.

Looking forward

Investor nerves are part of the backdrop. Reuters notes that shares in Nscale’s rival CoreWeave slumped in the week before its report over a $50bn debt load, setting off a wider sell-off in AI stocks. For UK readers, the practical question is less whether Nscale can win business than where it can switch the capacity on. In our view, a London-based developer negotiating new US capacity while its flagship UK site waits for a grid connection shows how much power access, alongside customer demand, shapes where UK firms can build.