Nvidia weighs playing the cosigner for Nscale’s AI data center in West Virginia

Nvidia is reportedly in talks to guarantee billions of dollars in debt financing for AI cloud provider Nscale’s planned Anthropic data center campus in West Virginia. The proposed residual-value guarantee would support financing for construction and electricity costs: if Nscale defaulted on construction payments, Nvidia could temporarily take over the facility and seek a buyer and replacement tenant. Nvidia has previously supported cloud providers mainly through lease and chip-purchase commitments rather than construction guarantees. Anthropic signed a $44.6 billion contract with Nscale for the campus’s first 460-megawatt building, which is expected to use Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips. Nscale and Anthropic are also discussing a second building agreement worth about $45 billion. Nscale is seeking an IPO valuation of up to $35 billion, while it had roughly 25,000 advanced AI chips operating in August against a plan for nearly 500,000. The West Virginia project received state certification in September after months of negotiations, following repeated flooding of nearby homes from construction-site runoff. Nvidia committed $1 billion in convertible financing to Nscale in September and has extended about $170 billion in investments and credit support to neoclouds and large customers, according to The Information.