Nvidia reportedly in talks to guarantee billions in debt for Nscale's Anthropic data center

Nvidia weighs guaranteeing Nscale's construction debt

Nvidia is negotiating to guarantee billions of dollars in debt financing for AI cloud provider Nscale's planned data center campus in West Virginia — the site Anthropic has contracted to use — according to reports from The Information and Bloomberg cited by TechCrunch. If the deal closes, the chipmaker would be acting as a co-signer on a customer's loans, a step beyond the financing it has offered the sector so far.

How the arrangement would work

The guarantee would help Nscale borrow against the electricity and construction costs of the West Virginia campus. According to The Information, the structure under discussion is a residual value guarantee: if Nscale missed construction payments, Nvidia would step in, temporarily take control of the facility, and work to find a buyer and a replacement tenant.

That would be a departure for the company. TechCrunch notes that Nvidia's earlier support for cloud providers has mostly covered chip purchases and leases rather than physical construction.

What Nscale has committed to Anthropic

The scale of the project helps explain the urgency. Anthropic has signed a $44.6 billion contract covering just the first building of the campus, according to Nscale's IPO filing. That building is a 460-megawatt facility expected to run Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, and the two companies are discussing a second deal worth roughly $45 billion for another building.

Nscale's execution record is under scrutiny

Nscale is seeking to go public at a valuation of up to $35 billion, but investors have questioned whether it can deliver projects of this size. As of August the company had roughly 25,000 advanced AI chips running, far short of the nearly 500,000 it intends to deploy.

The West Virginia site has had problems of its own. Runoff from the construction site has flooded nearby homes on more than one occasion, and the project only won state certification in September after months of negotiations. Earlier this month, Microsoft withdrew from a planned Nscale site in England after grid power for it slipped into the 2030s.

Nvidia's widening exposure to neoclouds

Nvidia has become one of the industry's largest financial backers, providing roughly $170 billion in investment and credit support to neocloud providers and big customers, according to The Information. That total includes $1 billion in convertible financing committed to Nscale in September.

The sector it is propping up has looked shaky. Shares of CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN had each lost more than 30% of their value in October as of late last week, CNBC reported. Neoclouds, which rent AI compute to third parties and lack a cash-rich core business of their own, have drawn investor skepticism about the debt tied up in their buildouts.

Anthropic's presence adds to Nvidia's motivation. The lab is among the biggest purchasers of AI compute and has divided its infrastructure spending among several chip suppliers. One investor told The Information that Anthropic's involvement likely explains why Nvidia wants to keep Nscale's project on track.

Anthropic faces its own borrowing questions

The talks also land at a delicate moment for Anthropic. The company filed to go public this week, but Blackstone has warned investors that Anthropic may receive a below-investment-grade credit rating after its IPO. A junk rating would make debt more expensive for Anthropic and could leave it depending on financially stronger partners to guarantee its borrowings — another reason a backstop from Nvidia could appeal to both sides.

Why it matters

Vendor financing is not new in tech, but this would take Nvidia from funding chip purchases to underwriting buildings. If AI cloud providers cannot raise construction debt on their own credit — and October's sell-off in neocloud stocks suggests investors have real doubts — then the pace of the AI buildout increasingly rests on the balance sheet of the chipmaker that sells into it. That deepens Nvidia's exposure, ties its fortunes directly to the solvency of its customers, and raises the question of what happens to the infrastructure boom if Nvidia ever steps back. For Anthropic, whose own creditworthiness is in question, having Nvidia behind its landlord removes one risk while concentrating the whole supply chain around a single company.