Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) walked away this summer from Monarch, a planned data center campus in Mason County, West Virginia, Bloomberg reported. The software giant had signed a letter of intent for the roughly 2,250-acre site in March. Microsoft left while reviewing its data center portfolio and its share of power generated on site, a source told Semafor. Microsoft declined to comment. That detail is important because Monarch is designed to make its own electricity. Nscale, which owns the campus, expects up to 2 gigawatts of generation there by the first half of 2028, according to its IPO filing. A tenant there is betting on a private power plant, not just renting servers. Now the company that replaced Microsoft wants more. Anthropic, the private company behind the Claude chatbot, is in talks to buy computing power from a second Monarch building. The deal could be worth about $45 billion, Bloomberg reported on Oct. 19. Anthropic’s current Monarch agreements are worth up to about $44.6 billion, the Nscale filing shows. The new building would match the first in size and double Anthropic’s footprint at Monarch. Anthropic also holds first dibs on a planned third building, Bloomberg noted. Bloomberg’s sources said a deal could close soon in the coming days, though no decision has been made. I read Microsoft’s exit less as a verdict on the site than as a choice about who carries the risk. Also read: Musk called Anthropic ‘evil’; SpaceX’s deal with it nearly doubled Microsoft left the building but kept the tenant Microsoft never walked away from Anthropic itself. In November 2025, it committed to invest up to $5 billion in the AI lab. The same announcement had Anthropic agreeing to buy $30 billion of computing capacity on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. That stake is already paying off. Microsoft booked a $3.2 billion gain on it in the quarter ended in June, TechCrunch reported. Nor did Microsoft drop Nscale, which the filing shows is expanding its work in Portugal. Microsoft simply stepped back from this one campus. I’d argue that Microsoft got the cleaner side of this trade. It shares in Anthropic’s growth without committing to years of payments at Monarch. The heavier load now sits with the landlord. Anthropic is in talks to buy computing power from a second building at Nscale’s West Virginia campus, the site Microsoft walked away from this summer. Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images Nscale’s IPO pitch now leans on a single customer Nscale, a London company launched in 2024, has applied to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NSCL. It booked $140.6 million in revenue in the first half of 2026, its filing shows. That is a thin base for a company promising tens of billions in computing power. The filing also puts Nscale’s total contracted value at about $103 billion as of Aug. 31, 2026. That backlog is the heart of its IPO pitch. By my math, Anthropic’s agreements make up as much as 43% of that backlog. A second deal of similar size would push that share past half. Nscale’s filing flags the danger itself, warning that a handful of customers drive much of its revenue. Meanwhile, some investors have urged Nscale to lower its target of about a $30 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported. A second Anthropic contract would help answer that pushback, which may explain the timing. Still, I see a mixed blessing for IPO buyers, who would largely be betting on one customer paying for years. Main Street already owns the safer side of this deal You can’t buy Anthropic or Nscale shares today, since neither trades publicly. Even so, anyone with an S&P 500 index fund already owns a slice of Microsoft and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), and both sit on what I see as the safer side of this deal. Microsoft owns the Anthropic stake that is already showing gains. Nvidia pledged up to $10 billion to Anthropic in the same November 2025 announcement. It also joined Nscale’s latest funding round, Bloomberg reported, and its Vera Rubin chips would power the new building. That is the key difference for everyday investors. Index fund holders benefit if Anthropic keeps growing, without betting the house on one landlord. Anyone buying Nscale at its IPO would be making a narrower bet, tied heavily to a single tenant. If that IPO tempts you, read the final prospectus first. Check how much of the backlog Anthropic represents once a second deal is counted. Nscale hasn’t started marketing its shares and is still answering SEC questions, Bloomberg reported, so there is time to do that homework. For Claude users, the payoff will take time. Anthropic said earlier this year that heavy demand had strained its systems, yet Monarch only aims to come online in 2027, Semafor reported. Steadier service from this deal is a 2027 story at the earliest. More Artificial Intelligence: AI’s biggest business opportunity may not look like AI AI racks are outgrowing old power: 2 chipmakers have a strategy BofA splits software into winners and losers as AI agents arrive Tech giants are handing AI’s power risk to startups Step back, and Monarch looks like a template. Tech giants secure AI capacity through stakes and cloud contracts, while younger firms such as Nscale borrow, build, and own the power plants. That split has a cost. Investors have grown wary of the borrowing behind the data center boom, Bloomberg reported, turning against chipmaker shares and cloud companies’ bonds. The setup works as long as AI labs keep growing into their contracts. If they stumble, the losses land first on the companies with the shortest track records and fewest customers. Whether this second deal closes, and how Nscale’s IPO prices afterward, will show who Wall Street thinks should hold that risk. The campus Microsoft passed on may end up revealing where the AI boom’s weakest link is. Related: Anthropic’s $2 trillion IPO dream hits a new reality
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