For more than two hours in July, Mason County residents pressed their commissioners about dust, water pressure, flooding and further development around the Monarch construction site. Afterward, resident Elaine Matheny gave the reason: “Because we don’t think that the company is always going to do the right thing.”
State environmental officials had already ordered stronger stormwater controls after violations at the site. The reported Anthropic agreement would fill the first of Monarch’s three planned data-center buildings with Nvidia’s coming Vera Rubin systems.
Who gets the $45 billion
Nscale, a cloud-infrastructure provider, would receive the money as rental payments over six years. Anthropic would receive reserved computing power, not the land, the buildings or a stake in Nscale. The sum is not an upfront construction payment.
Whether the agreement is signed and binding remains unknown. Neither company had disclosed it on the official pages captured for this story, and Reuters said neither immediately responded to requests for comment.
The customer changed
Monarch was already under construction. In March, Nscale said Microsoft had signed a letter of intent, not a final lease, for up to 1.35 gigawatts of computing capacity in the project’s first phase, with deliveries expected to begin in late 2027.
Bloomberg now reports that Microsoft left during the summer and Anthropic took its place in the first building. The roughly 460 megawatts reserved for Anthropic amount to about one-third of that phase, comparable to the simultaneous electricity demand of roughly 345,000 US homes. Nscale is targeting early 2028 for the full phase.
The power must be built too
Project filings describe a proposed 2.16-gigawatt natural-gas plant that would generate electricity on-site instead of relying on the public grid. Its plans call for 864 primary gas engines and 12 emergency diesel generators to serve the three data centers.
The state’s captured air-permit docket showed a construction application and modeling documents, but no draft or final permit.
Monarch adds to a long list of capacity Anthropic has secured from outside suppliers. The company has announced more than 300 megawatts through SpaceX, plans reaching 5 gigawatts apiece with Amazon and with Google and Broadcom, $30 billion of Azure capacity and a $50 billion Fluidstack program.
Anthropic is also beginning to design its own processors, as Onset reported last week. Those chips remain a plan; outside suppliers are how the company is reserving far more computing power now.
At Monarch, that capacity would be spoken for before the site had a final air permit, finished buildings or a single installed Vera Rubin system.