Nvidia in Talks to Guarantee Billions in Debt for Nscale's West Virginia AI Campus

Nvidia is in talks to guarantee billions of dollars in debt financing for Nscale's planned Anthropic data center in West Virginia, The Information reported Thursday, with Bloomberg later corroborating the report. The arrangement would mark a shift: the chipmaker co-signing a customer's construction loans rather than backstopping chip purchases and leases.

The scale of the underlying deal is enormous. Anthropic has signed a $44.6 billion contract for the project's first building alone, according to Nscale's IPO filing. The contract covers the first 460-megawatt building at Nscale's West Virginia campus, which is expected to run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips. The companies are also discussing a second deal worth roughly $45 billion for another building.

The proposed arrangement would help Nscale secure financing for the electricity and construction costs of the campus. Under a structure known as a residual value guarantee (a promise by a backer to absorb losses and manage an asset if a borrower defaults), Nvidia would step in if Nscale defaulted on construction payments, temporarily take over the facility, and help find a buyer and a new tenant, according to The Information.

Nvidia's earlier support for cloud providers has mostly covered leases and chip purchases, not construction. Extending that support to building finance is a signal of how hard the AI industry is working to keep its buildout plans afloat as investors grow jittery about the amounts of money involved.

Why would Nvidia co-sign a customer's loans?

The commercial logic runs through Anthropic. Anthropic, one of the largest buyers of AI computing power, has spread its infrastructure spending across multiple chipmakers. One investor told The Information that Anthropic's involvement likely explains Nvidia's interest in keeping Nscale's project on track. The guarantee would deepen Nvidia's financial ties to Nscale while helping secure a major customer for its chips.

Nvidia has been a major financial backer of the sector. The company has extended roughly $170 billion in investments and credit support to neoclouds (firms that rent out AI computing power without a cash-rich core business behind them) and large customers, according to The Information. That includes $1 billion in convertible financing committed to Nscale in September.

What is at stake for Nscale?

The stakes are high for the AI cloud provider, which is seeking to go public at a valuation of up to $35 billion despite growing concerns about its ability to deliver on ambitious data center projects.

Nscale has struggled to get its projects off the ground. The company had about 25,000 advanced AI chips running in August — a fraction of the nearly 500,000 it plans to deploy. Its West Virginia campus has run into trouble of its own: runoff from the construction site has flooded nearby homes more than once. In September, after months of negotiations, the project won state certification.

The setbacks are not confined to the United States. This month, Microsoft pulled out of a planned Nscale site in England after grid power for it was pushed into the 2030s.

How much pressure are neoclouds under?

The pressure on the sector is measurable in its stock prices. Shares of CoreWeave, Nebius, and IREN had each fallen more than 30% in October as of last week, CNBC reported. Neoclouds, which lack the cash-generating core businesses of established cloud providers, have come under pressure from investors questioning the durability of their financing models.

That market backdrop frames Nvidia's move. A residual value guarantee transfers part of Nscale's construction risk onto Nvidia's balance sheet, making the project's debt more credible to lenders at a moment when debt investors are demanding stronger assurances. It also extends Nvidia's role from chip supplier to de facto credit partner for the infrastructure built around its silicon.

What does this mean for Anthropic's own finances?

The discussions also land as Anthropic faces questions about how it will finance its own rapid expansion. 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 raise Anthropic's borrowing costs and could push the company to keep relying on stronger partners to back its debt.

That dynamic cuts in Nvidia's favor. If Anthropic cannot borrow cheaply on its own, partnerships such as the Nscale contract — with Nvidia guaranteeing the underlying infrastructure — become one of the few viable paths for the compute buyer to scale capacity. One investor told The Information that Anthropic's involvement likely explains Nvidia's willingness to intervene.

What happens next?

No deal is finalized, and both the talks and the terms could change; neither Nvidia nor Nscale has confirmed the structure publicly. But if Nvidia proceeds, it would set a precedent: a chipmaker underwriting physical data center construction for a customer, not just its own supply chain. With roughly $45 billion in additional Anthropic capacity under discussion and Nscale's $35 billion IPO valuation on the line, the guarantee would tie Nvidia's fortunes more directly than ever to the solvency of the AI buildout it supplies.