Nscale, a British cloud infrastructure provider, is developing the Monarch Compute Campus in Mason County, West Virginia, a roughly 2,250-acre site acquired in March 2026 through Nscale's purchase of American Intelligence & Power Corporation. Anthropic has signed a six-year, $45 billion lease covering approximately 460 megawatts of capacity in the first of three planned buildings, making this one of the largest compute-infrastructure agreements ever reported. The deal was first reported by Bloomberg and picked up by Reuters, US Data Center Projects, and Forbes.

The Anthropic agreement covers the first building of Monarch's three-building first phase, which is designed for roughly 1.35 gigawatts of AI computing capacity in total. At full build-out, the campus is planned for more than 8 gigawatts, with about 6.7 gigawatts earmarked for computing. The facility will deploy Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 GPU racks, with initial capacity targeted for late 2027 and the full 1.35GW first phase targeted for delivery in the first half of 2028.

Nscale is a British cloud infrastructure provider positioning itself as a large-scale AI compute landlord. The Monarch Compute Campus is described as Nscale's flagship project. The company acquired the Mason County site in March 2026 through its purchase of American Intelligence & Power Corporation, bringing both the land and its power development assets under one roof ahead of the Anthropic deal.

Monarch's power model is the single most important detail for anyone trying to understand what staffing this campus will actually require. The roughly 460 megawatts of on-site generation for the initial Vera Rubin deployments comes from an array of nearly a thousand natural-gas and diesel engines. That is not a data center generator yard. It is effectively a distributed power plant operating continuously at utility scale. Every maintenance cycle, controls fault, and fuel-logistics decision that a grid utility would handle externally becomes an internal operations problem. The campus will compete directly with midstream energy projects and peaker plants for engine technicians, controls engineers, and fuel-systems specialists, not just with other data centers for IT infrastructure staff.

Mason County sits in a corridor with deep roots in coal, natural-gas generation, and heavy manufacturing. That workforce translates directly into the mechanical and electrical maintenance a self-powered campus demands. West Virginia's building-trades unions, including electricians, ironworkers, pipefitters, and operating engineers, are well-established in power and industrial construction and are likely to drive the construction of both the generation plant and the data center shells. The Charleston-Huntington metro is the nearest major labor market, with Columbus and Cincinnati reachable within a few hours for peak-construction supplemental hiring. The non-obvious bottleneck here is not data center technicians. It is power-operations talent: engine techs and controls engineers who are already being competed for by the midstream and utility-scale power sectors across the region. Firms placing into this project should be sourcing from those adjacent industries, not just from the conventional data center candidate pool. We break down roles, pay, and where the talent is in our guide to hiring data center talent in Mason County, West Virginia.

Sources: Bloomberg, which first reported the Anthropic lease, and Reuters, US Data Center Projects, and Forbes.