Nvidia may guarantee Nscale's debt for Anthropic's $45 billion West Virginia data center

The skim

• Nvidia is in talks to guarantee billions of dollars in debt for Nscale, a UK AI cloud company building a West Virginia data center for Anthropic, The Information reported. Bloomberg has confirmed the talks.
• If Nscale stopped making construction payments, Nvidia would take over the site for a time and help find a buyer and a new tenant. Nvidia's past support for AI cloud companies has mostly covered leases and chip purchases, not construction.
• The stakes are high. Anthropic can walk away from its roughly $45 billion contract if Nscale doesn't line up financing by a deadline, and Nscale's planned IPO has slipped toward December.

What happened

TechCrunch and The Next Web report that The Information broke the story on Thursday and Bloomberg confirmed it, citing a person familiar with the matter. Under what's called a residual value guarantee, Nvidia would back the value of the first 460-megawatt building at Nscale's West Virginia campus. That would help Nscale borrow for the site's electricity and construction costs. Nothing is signed, and the terms could still change. Nscale declined to comment to Bloomberg, and Nvidia didn't respond.

Anthropic signed in August to rent computing power in that first building. Nscale's IPO filing puts the contract at $44.6 billion, according to TechCrunch, and the building is expected to use Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips. The companies are discussing a second deal of about $45 billion for another building. The Financial Times reported that the Anthropic contract is more than 40% of Nscale's $103 billion revenue backlog, but that Nscale says in its filings it hasn't yet secured the money to build or equip the first building. Anthropic can walk away if that money isn't in place by a set deadline.

Why it matters

This is a chipmaker co-signing a customer's construction loans so the customer can keep buying its chips. Nvidia has already extended about $170 billion in investments and credit support to "neoclouds" and big customers, according to The Information, including $1 billion in convertible financing to Nscale in September. A building guarantee goes a step further.

It's happening because the money is getting harder to find. The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia and other possible backers began demanding stricter terms after markets turned, which delayed Nscale's revised IPO prospectus. Some of its bankers warn the listing is unlikely to hit the $30 billion to $35 billion valuation it targeted. According to the Journal, AI cloud companies such as CoreWeave, Nebius and Nscale have effectively been shut out of the bond market in recent weeks. It's the same chill that just shrank OpenAI's funding round.

Nscale also has problems of its own. The FT reported a $1 billion net loss on $141 million of revenue in the first half of 2026. In September, state regulators ordered work at the West Virginia site to stop for three days after runoff flooded nearby homes, and the site has drawn 10 notices of violation for stormwater controls. A person close to Nscale told the FT that extreme weather caused the flooding and that the damage has been fixed. TechCrunch notes Nscale had about 25,000 advanced AI chips running in August, out of the nearly 500,000 it plans to deploy, and that Microsoft pulled out of a planned Nscale site in England this month.

What's next

Watch for a signed guarantee, Nscale's revised prospectus and whether Anthropic's financing deadline is met. Anthropic, which filed for its own IPO this week, has a lot riding on the timing: the West Virginia building is one of the places its future computing power is supposed to come from.

Sources: TechCrunch, The Next Web and Reuters (via CNA).