Nvidia is considering guaranteeing debt for Nscale's data centers. On October 31, 2026, TechCrunch reported that Nvidia is in talks to provide billions of dollars in debt guarantees for the AI cloud provider's Anthropic data center project in West Virginia, a story first reported by The Information and later corroborated by Bloomberg. If the talks succeed, the chipmaker would directly back a customer's construction loans, a new signal in the financing chain behind the AI compute buildout.
The guarantee would take the form of a residual value guarantee. According to The Information, if Nscale fell behind on construction payments, Nvidia would step in, take over the facility, and help find a buyer and a new tenant. Nvidia's earlier support for cloud providers mostly covered leases and chip purchases; guarantees for construction are uncommon. The guarantee covers power and construction costs at Nscale's West Virginia campus, where Anthropic has signed a $44.6 billion contract for the first building, a 460-megawatt facility set to use Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips; the two sides are also discussing a second building worth about $45 billion.
Nscale's delivery record is the other side of the negotiation. As of August, the company had about 25,000 advanced chips actually running, far short of the nearly 500,000 it plans to deploy; runoff from the West Virginia construction site has flooded nearby homes more than once, and the project won state certification in September only after months of negotiations. This month, Microsoft pulled out of a planned Nscale site in England because grid power would be delayed into the 2030s. Meanwhile, shares of neocloud providers including CoreWeave, Nebius, and IREN each fell more than 30% in October, and investor patience with such asset-light compute companies is thinning.
Why Nvidia Would Backstop a Customer
The answer lies in the customer base. Anthropic is one of the largest buyers of computing power and has spread its infrastructure spending across multiple chipmakers; The Information quoted an investor as saying Anthropic's involvement likely explains Nvidia's interest in keeping the project on track. A guarantee would both help Nscale secure construction funding and lock in a major customer for Vera Rubin. According to The Information, Nvidia has extended roughly $170 billion in investment and credit support to neocloud providers and large customers, including $1 billion in convertible financing committed to Nscale in September.
Anthropic's Own Financing Pressure Is Rising
In the same week, Anthropic filed to go public, but Blackstone has warned investors that the company may not receive an investment-grade credit rating after its IPO. A lower rating means higher borrowing costs, leaving Anthropic more dependent on well-funded partners to share its debt. The guarantee talks are still under way, and the amount, term, and triggers have not been disclosed. The contract is signed; what will decide the deal's value is whether the first building can be powered on schedule and run at its full 460 megawatts.
