Anthropic has signed a deal to rent about $45 billion in AI compute from Nscale, a British AI infrastructure company, a source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. Yes, you read that right: $45 billion. For context, that's roughly the GDP of a small country, or about 45 billion chances to ask an AI to write a poem about a peanut.

Nscale, founded only in 2024, has already cut deals with the likes of Microsoft, and will supply Anthropic with compute via Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, its new state-of-the-art chip system. The Vera Rubin system combines six different chips working in concert, and is considered the cutting edge of chip design. Because why have one chip when you can have six? The compute capacity is expected to start powering the AI lab's services in late 2027, the source said.

The deal, first reported by Bloomberg, is only the latest in a spree of compute partnerships for Anthropic. Bloomberg writes that the deal spans six years, with the computing power coming from Nscale's flagship data center in West Virginia. Because nothing says 'cutting-edge AI' like a data center in the Mountain State.

Over the past eight months, Anthropic has aggressively scaled up its compute capacity in an effort to better compete with rivals, most notably OpenAI. Because in the AI arms race, the one with the most computing power wins, even if they don't know what to do with it all.

Earlier this month, Anthropic signed a $10 billion deal with AI cloud startup Volta - founded only this past January - securing a six-year supply of cloud computing power from a data center in Norway. Because why not throw another $10 billion at a company that's barely a year old? In July, the company also signed a $5 billion compute-related deal with AMD.

A few months before that, in May, Anthropic revealed it had entered into a large computing deal with SpaceX (run by Elon Musk, whose rivalry with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made him an unlikely ally of Anthropic). That deal draws computing capacity from two different SpaceX data centers and is reportedly providing Anthropic with $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. That's $15 billion a year, in case you're counting. And we're sure Elon is.

In April, Anthropic also signed a deal to significantly expand its partnership with Amazon, gaining access to an additional 5 gigawatts of compute. Because why not add 'gigawatts' to your vocabulary? That same month, the company also expanded its relationship with Google and Broadcom, adding even more power capacity.

Anthropic is hardly alone in its enthusiastic pursuit of more AI horsepower. The race to gobble up as much compute capacity as possible is ongoing, with other major players - including Google, OpenAI, and Meta - all following a similar track. Because in the world of AI, there's no such thing as too much compute, only too little foresight.