Nvidia is in talks to guarantee billions in debt financing for Nscale's planned Anthropic data center in West Virginia, The Information reported Thursday, with Bloomberg later corroborating the report. Anthropic has signed a $44.6 billion contract for the first building alone, according to Nscale's IPO filing. The chipmaker would effectively co-sign a customer's loans, which shows how far suppliers go to keep AI buildout plans funded as investors question the scale of spending.
Residual guarantee for West Virginia campus
Nscale seeks to go public at a valuation of up to $35 billion while facing doubts about delivery of its data center projects. The proposed arrangement would help it secure financing for electricity and construction costs of the West Virginia campus. Under a residual value guarantee, Nvidia would step in if Nscale defaulted on construction payments, temporarily take over the facility, and help find a buyer and new tenant, according to The Information.
Nvidia's earlier support for cloud providers mostly covered leases and chip purchases, not construction. The shift matters because construction and power commitments come before any revenue from computing capacity. A guarantee of this type transfers part of the early-stage project risk from lenders to the chip supplier. It also ties Nvidia more closely to timely completion and occupancy of a site built for its hardware.
Anthropic's contract covers the first 460-megawatt building at the West Virginia campus, expected to use Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips. The companies are also discussing a second deal worth roughly $45 billion for another building. Nscale had about 25,000 advanced AI chips running in August, a fraction of the nearly 500,000 it plans to deploy. Runoff from the West Virginia construction site flooded nearby homes more than once, and the project won state certification in September after months of negotiations.
What the guarantee means for AI buyers
For companies that rent AI computing power, the deal could preserve another large source of capacity anchored by Anthropic as a tenant. Nscale belongs to neoclouds that rent out AI compute without a cash-rich core business, a model now under pressure. Shares of CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN had each fallen more than 30% in October as of last week, CNBC reported. If construction financing holds, enterprise customers keep an additional vendor for Nvidia-based capacity alongside larger clouds.
The structure carries clear limits for anyone planning around it. Talks do not equal signed financing, and Microsoft pulled out of a planned Nscale site in England this month after grid power was pushed into the 2030s. Nvidia has extended roughly $170 billion in investments and credit support to neoclouds and large customers, including $1 billion in convertible financing committed to Nscale in September. Buyers should verify power availability, construction timetable, chip allocation and what happens to contracts if the facility changes owner or tenant.
The marker to watch is whether Nvidia signs the residual value guarantee and Nscale closes construction financing for the first 460-megawatt building. A second signal is progress on the discussed second building worth roughly $45 billion. Anthropic filed to go public this week, while Blackstone warned it may receive a below-investment-grade rating after IPO. If guarantees become routine, access to capacity will depend more on supplier balance sheets than on standalone data center economics.
