Power capacity, measured in megawatts of committed electrical load at the data center level, is the physical constraint that determines how large an AI company's compute footprint can grow at any single site. Anthropic has agreed to rent around 460 megawatts of compute capacity at an Nscale data center development in West Virginia, according to sources. The deal is valued at $45 billion.
Where 460 megawatts sits in the stack
Compute capacity in data center agreements is measured in megawatts because power consumption is the binding variable at scale. AI accelerator hardware, the GPU and custom silicon clusters that handle training runs and inference workloads, draws substantial continuous power. Thermal management tracks that electrical load closely. The more megawatts a tenant contracts for, the more hardware it can physically install and run. Committing to 460 megawatts defines the ceiling for what Anthropic can deploy and operate at this West Virginia location. Nscale's West Virginia site is a data center development, meaning the facility is in build-out rather than already operational at the time of the deal.
A 460-megawatt single-site commitment is a large allocation by the measure of current AI infrastructure deployments, where power constraints routinely determine the scale and pace at which model development can proceed.
The arrangement is a rental. Anthropic takes on compute capacity without owning or constructing the underlying facility; Nscale, as the developer, carries the capital expenditure for the build-out and power infrastructure. That separation between facility owner and compute tenant is a standard structure in large-scale cloud agreements. Anthropic secures access to the capacity without carrying the balance-sheet weight of greenfield data center construction.
The $45 billion figure, attributed to sources, is the value of Anthropic's tenancy commitment at the Nscale development in West Virginia.