Anthropic Has Contracted 1.19 GW. Half of It Costs $2.37M per MW-Year, the Other Half $15.46M.

Almost every story written about Anthropic's compute buying is written from the seller's side: one counterparty, one headline number, one share price. Nscale on Wednesday. Riot Platforms this month. TeraWulf in July. Volta three weeks ago.

Turn it round. Four publicly reported deals now supply all three fields — a dollar value, a megawatt figure and a term — which is the minimum needed to price anything. Only TeraWulf names Anthropic in a company disclosure: Riot publishes the contract terms but calls the tenant a leading frontier AI lab, while the Nscale and Volta terms and Anthropic attributions are press-reported. On those reported terms, Anthropic has contracted about 1,185 MW for roughly $83.1 billion of total value.

That is where the useful part starts and the headline arithmetic stops. Divide $83.1 billion by 1,185 MW and you get $70.1 million per MW, which is not a price; it is four contracts of two different lengths averaged into a number with no unit anyone can use. Divide each deal by its own term first, and the portfolio does not converge on a market rate. It separates cleanly into two.

Six numbers before the argument

• 1,185 MW across four deals on their reported power bases, of which the compute-inclusive side uses 460 MW of unlabelled Nscale power and Volta's 133 MW of gross power, while the 592 MW real-estate side is critical IT load.
• $2.369M per MW-year at TeraWulf's Justified campus in Kentucky: $19B over 20 years for 401 MW of critical IT load, disclosed by TeraWulf with Anthropic named.
• $2.382M per MW-year at Riot's Rockdale campus in Texas: $9.1B over 20 years for 191 MW of critical IT capacity. Riot's own release says "a leading frontier AI lab"; the press named Anthropic.
• Those two agree to within 0.6%, on separate sites, separate sellers and separate months.
• $16.30M per MW-year at Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia and $12.53M at Volta's Tydal site in Norway — both six years, both Nvidia Vera Rubin, both attributed to unnamed sources rather than disclosed. The Volta rate uses 133 MW of gross power; Bitdeer separately discloses 121 MW of critical IT load, which would put that contract at $13.77M per IT MW-year.
• $13.08M per MW-year between the two groups, which is what the silicon and its operator appear to cost on top of a powered building.

The table above the article carries all four rows on the common annual clock. It is the same correction we applied to the neocloud revenue-per-megawatt ranking last week: contract value per megawatt is price multiplied by time, and it cannot be compared with anything until time is removed. We were not the only ones dividing by years this week — an account with 28,000 views on the post published the same $16.3 million figure for Nscale within hours. The division is not the contribution. What follows is.

Two twenty-year leases, 0.6% apart

TeraWulf disclosed its lease on 6 July: a 20-year agreement with Anthropic at the Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, for approximately 401 MW of critical IT load, expected to generate approximately $19 billion of contracted revenue over the initial term.

• $19B ÷ 20 years = $950M a year; ÷ 401 MW = $2.369M per MW-year.

Riot disclosed its lease alongside second-quarter results on 10 August: 191 MW of critical IT capacity at Rockdale, Texas, a 20-year initial term running through June 2048, approximately $9.1 billion of total initial contract revenue, and two five-year extension options at the tenant's election taking potential value to about $16.1 billion.

• $9.1B ÷ 20 years = $455M a year; ÷ 191 MW = $2.382M per MW-year.

A 0.6% gap between two separately negotiated leases, on different grids, disclosed five weeks apart, is close enough to read as a price rather than as two coincidences. On lifetime value the agreement is just as tight: $47.4M per MW at Justified against $47.6M per MW at Rockdale.

Both are build-to-suit shells. Riot's is specified as Tier 3 with a phased delivery of 96 MW by December 2027 and the full 191 MW by June 2028; TeraWulf's is phased into service in the second half of 2027 and ramps to 401 MW by early 2028. These are contracted revenue totals, not cash already owed, and rent begins as capacity is delivered. Neither company's disclosure describes selling Anthropic any GPUs. If either lease turns out to carry compute inside the contract, the split in this article does not hold — that is the load-bearing assumption here, and it is an inference from what the releases do and do not say, not a disclosure.

Riot also put a margin on it: estimated cumulative net operating income of $7.3–8.2 billion over the base term, or $365–411 million a year against $455 million of annual rent. That is 80–90% NOI on the lease line, which is what a powered shell is supposed to look like and what a compute contract is not.

Six years buys something else entirely

The other half of the megawatts is priced 6.5× higher and is a fifth of the length.

Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Anthropic will pay Nscale about $45 billion over six years for roughly 460 MW at the Monarch campus in West Virginia, running Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems from late 2027. Aker, an Nscale shareholder, disclosed a contract of approximately $45 billion the same day but named no customer, term or capacity. Anthropic declined to comment and no contract is public.

• $45B ÷ 6 years ÷ 460 MW = $16.30M per MW-year.

Three weeks earlier the same pattern: Volta Infra announced a roughly $10 billion agreement with an unnamed AI lab, and press reports attributed it to Anthropic and put the compute agreement at six years. Bitdeer's filed agreement with Volta identifies 121 MW of critical IT load supported by 133 MW of gross power at the Tydal site in Norway; the reported $10 billion rate uses the 133 MW gross figure.

• $10B ÷ 6 years ÷ 133 MW = $12.53M per MW-year.

Together on the reported capacity figures, 593 MW at $9.167 billion a year: $15.458M per MW-year, against $2.373M for the 592 MW of shell. The ratio is 6.51× and the difference is $13.08M per MW-year. That is not a like-for-like power denominator: Volta is gross power, TeraWulf and Riot are critical IT load, and Nscale's basis remains unlabelled.

Nothing about the deal length is arbitrary. A building depreciates over decades and is leased for decades; a GPU generation is obsolete in half a decade and is contracted for six years. Anthropic is signing 20-year contracts for the thing that lasts 20 years and six-year contracts for the thing that lasts six. The same structure shows up on the other side of the industry — the SB Energy campus in Ohio that Nvidia backstopped this month hosts OpenAI on 20-year leases while the silicon inside turns over on its own clock.

Sizing the gap against Nvidia's own number

The $13.08 million is where an inference becomes checkable, because Nvidia has now put a per-gigawatt figure on the record. On Wednesday's call the company quoted revenue opportunity per gigawatt of data centre at $18 billion with Hopper, $25 billion with Grace Blackwell and $40 billion with Vera Rubin.

Run Anthropic's Rubin half against that. 593 MW at $15.458M per MW-year over six years is $92.75 billion per gigawatt of six-year contract value. Nvidia's $40 billion per gigawatt is 43% of it. The remaining 57% has to cover the shell, the power, the networking, the operator's staff and the seller's margin over six years — and the shell half of Anthropic's own book says a building costs about $14.2 billion per gigawatt across six years at the 20-year rate.

Those pieces do not reconcile to the dollar and should not be expected to: the $40 billion is Nvidia's revenue opportunity rather than a price Nscale has confirmed paying, the shell rate comes from 20-year leases being stretched over a six-year window, and neither Nscale nor Volta has disclosed a bill of materials. What the exercise establishes is that a $92.75 billion per gigawatt six-year contract is the right order of magnitude for a facility whose chips alone are a $40 billion line, and that the shell is the small part of it.

Why the $8.92M average is arithmetic, not a market price

Weight all four deals by capacity and the portfolio runs at $8.921M per MW-year — $10.572 billion a year of contracted spend across 1,185 MW. That number is ours, and there are three reasons not to treat it as Anthropic's cost of compute.

The two halves are different products. An average of a lease and a compute contract describes neither. It is the same error as ranking neoclouds on a mixture of annual and cumulative rows, one level up.

The megawatt is not the same megawatt. TeraWulf and Riot both specify critical IT load. The reporting on Nscale describes 460 MW variously as power capacity and as compute capacity. Volta's denominator is now explicit: Bitdeer discloses 121 MW of critical IT load supported by 133 MW gross, while the reporting on the $10 billion compute contract uses 133 MW. On the IT denominator Volta is $13.77M per MW-year, not $12.53M. TeraWulf's own filings size the same gap: Justified has access to approximately 480 MW of gross power capacity behind the 401 MW of critical IT load leased to Anthropic — a factor of 1.20 — and it puts a planned New York site at about 400 MW gross against roughly 320 MW of critical IT load, a factor of 1.25. If Nscale's 460 MW is a facility figure rather than an IT figure, the true rate is nearer $19.5M per MW-year and the gap between the halves widens rather than closes.

Only one Anthropic tenant is company-confirmed. TeraWulf names Anthropic. Riot publishes the full commercial terms but identifies only a leading frontier AI lab; the press supplies the Anthropic attribution. The Nscale and Volta terms — the two that carry 87% of annualised spend — and both Anthropic attributions come from reporting on private agreements.

And the set is a floor, not a total. Anthropic committed $50 billion to US data centres with Fluidstack last November with no capacity or term attached to the figure, took a stake in a Macquarie- and GIC-backed development platform with no capital figure, capacity target, sites or timeline disclosed at all, and has separate arrangements with Amazon, Google and AMD that are not leases and do not carry comparable per-megawatt terms. 1.19 GW is what can be priced, not what has been bought.

What it does to the CoreWeave model

Our CoreWeave model prices the company off active power, and its starting driver is $2.238 million per MW per quarter — $8.952 million per MW-year — derived from Q2 revenue, 1.5 GW of active power and the share of that power earning across the quarter.

Anthropic's blended $8.921 million lands 0.3% away from it. That is a coincidence and nothing else: one is realised revenue on partly-energised megawatts, the other is forward contract value on capacity that mostly does not exist yet, and the two agreeing tells you only that both are somewhere in the middle of a range whose ends are 6.5× apart.

The useful comparison is against the halves, not the blend. CoreWeave's realised rate is 3.8× the powered-shell price and 42% below the Rubin contract rate, which is roughly where a company that buys its own GPUs and sells compute ought to sit. Put the disclosed contracts on the same clock and the ladder is orderly:

The model does not change. Nothing here is a CoreWeave disclosure, the power definitions on two of the six rows are unresolved, and the Rubin rate is for hardware that starts arriving late in 2027. What the ladder is good for is the opposite of a valuation input: it says that a per-megawatt figure without a term and a power definition beside it can be moved across an order of magnitude without anyone typing a wrong number.

What to watch

1. Whether either 20-year lease carries compute. The whole split rests on TeraWulf's and Riot's leases being real estate. A lease exhibit, or a capex schedule showing who buys the GPUs, settles it.
2. The power basis on Nscale. Critical IT load or facility power. At TeraWulf's own disclosed 1.20× ratio that is the difference between $16.3M and $19.5M per MW-year. Volta's basis is disclosed: 121 MW critical IT behind 133 MW gross.
3. Capacity and term on the Fluidstack commitment. $50 billion with no megawatts and no years attached is the largest single unpriceable item in Anthropic's book.
4. A third 20-year lease. Two data points 0.6% apart look like a price. A third at $2.4M would make it one.
5. Whether the six-year rate holds on the next Rubin deal. Nscale at $16.30M and Volta at $12.53M are 30% apart, which is a wide band for the same chips in the same year.

The single most quoted number about Anthropic's infrastructure is a total: $83 billion, or $133 billion once the Fluidstack commitment is added. The number that carries information is that the same buyer, in the same eight weeks, paid $2.37 million per MW-year for a building and $15.46 million for a building with Rubin in it — and that it bought almost exactly the same quantity of each.

TeraWulf's 20-year Anthropic lease (~401 MW of critical IT load, ~$19B over the initial term, phased into service from the second half of 2027) and Justified's ~480 MW of gross power capacity are disclosed in its 6 July announcement and its 5 August quarterly release. Riot's terms (191 MW of critical IT capacity, 20 years through June 2048, ~$9.1B initial and $16.1B with both five-year options, $7.3–8.2B cumulative NOI, phased delivery to June 2028) are disclosed in its 10 August quarterly release, which names the tenant only as a leading frontier AI lab; the attribution to Anthropic is press-reported. The Nscale terms ($45B, six years, 460 MW, Vera Rubin from late 2027) and the Volta compute terms ($10B, six years) reach us through Bloomberg and Reuters citing people familiar with private agreements; Aker disclosed the ~$45B contract value without a customer, term or capacity, and Anthropic declined to comment on both. Bitdeer's 6-K discloses the underlying Volta Tydal site at 121 MW critical IT supported by 133 MW gross, with a separate ~$4.7B 16-year colocation lease. Nvidia's $18B/$25B/$40B revenue opportunity per gigawatt is from its 26 August call. Every per-MW-year figure, every ratio and the 1,185 MW and $83.1B totals are R40 arithmetic on the reported terms, not company guidance; extensions are excluded, and the totals are contracted values rather than upfront obligations. The shell-versus-compute split is an inference from what the leases disclose, not a disclosed decomposition. The IREN, Nebius and CoreWeave rows come from the linked R40 coverage and model.