Nvidia is in talks to guarantee billions of dollars in debt financing for a planned Anthropic data center in West Virginia being built by the AI cloud provider Nscale, according to a report first published by The Information and corroborated by Bloomberg. The arrangement would see the world's dominant AI chipmaker effectively cosign a customer's construction loans — the latest sign of how far AI infrastructure players are going to keep their buildout plans financed as investors grow wary of the sums involved.
Anthropic has already signed a $44.6 billion contract covering just the first building of the West Virginia campus, according to Nscale's own IPO filing. Under the proposed deal, known as a residual value guarantee, Nvidia would step in if Nscale defaulted on construction payments, temporarily take over the facility, and help find a new buyer or tenant. The companies are also discussing a second arrangement worth roughly $45 billion for an additional building on the same site.
A chipmaker's growing financial footprint
Nvidia has already extended roughly $170 billion in investments and credit support to neoclouds — companies that rent out AI computing capacity without a large cash-generating core business behind them — and other big customers, including $1 billion in convertible financing committed to Nscale in September. The stakes are high for Nscale, which is seeking to go public at a valuation of up to $35 billion even as it has struggled to bring projects online: the company had roughly 25,000 advanced AI chips running as of August, a fraction of the nearly 500,000 it has planned to deploy. Nscale's West Virginia site has also drawn complaints after construction runoff flooded nearby homes more than once, and in September the project won state certification only after months of negotiations. Microsoft, meanwhile, pulled out of a separate planned Nscale site in England this month after grid power for it was pushed into the 2030s.
The financing talks come as neocloud stocks sell off sharply: shares of CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN had each fallen more than 30% in October. They also arrive the same week Anthropic filed to go public, with Blackstone warning investors that the AI lab may receive a below-investment-grade, or "junk," credit rating after its listing — a status that would raise its borrowing costs and could push it to keep leaning on deep-pocketed partners such as Nvidia to backstop its ambitions.
One investor told The Information that Anthropic's own position as one of the largest buyers of AI computing capacity likely explains Nvidia's eagerness to keep the Nscale project on track, even as Anthropic itself spreads its infrastructure spending across multiple chip suppliers rather than relying on Nvidia alone.