Nvidia is reportedly in talks to guarantee billions in debt financing for Nscale's planned Anthropic data center in West Virginia. According to The Information, which Bloomberg later corroborated, the arrangement would take the form of a residual value guarantee: if Nscale defaulted on construction payments, Nvidia would step in, temporarily take over the facility, and help find a buyer and new tenant. The report describes this as, in essence, the chipmaker co-signing a customer's loans.
That is a significant departure. The report notes that Nvidia's earlier support for cloud providers has mostly covered leases and chip purchases, not construction. Moving into construction risk means a company whose business is designing and selling chips would be carrying exposure to electricity costs, building schedules and the fortunes of a project that has already faced problems. Nscale's record gives reason for caution. The company had about 25,000 advanced AI chips running in August, far short of the nearly 500,000 it plans to deploy, and the West Virginia campus has drawn complaints after runoff from construction flooded nearby homes more than once.
The incentive is easy to see. Anthropic has signed a $44.6 billion contract for the first building alone, according to Nscale's IPO filing, and the report says the companies are discussing a second deal worth roughly $45 billion. Nvidia has committed roughly $170 billion in investments and credit support across neoclouds and large customers, according to The Information, so keeping a major buyer of its chips on schedule is a strong motive. One investor told the outlet that Anthropic's involvement likely explains Nvidia's interest.
That motive is also the problem. Nvidia would be underwriting a customer's buildout at the moment investors are growing jittery. The report notes that shares of CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN had each fallen more than 30% in October as of last week, and Blackstone has warned that Anthropic may receive a below-investment-grade rating after its IPO. If the guarantee gets used, the chipmaker stops being a supplier and becomes a creditor with a stake in whether the whole chain holds together.
Nvidia should be cautious and insist on hard limits before agreeing: clear caps on exposure, firm construction milestones, and transparency with its own shareholders about what it has guaranteed. The AI buildout cannot rest on the balance sheet of its most profitable supplier indefinitely.