Nvidia is negotiating debt guarantees for British cloud provider Nscale to fund a massive data center campus in West Virginia for artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.
The discussions were reported by Bloomberg and The Information. The proposed financial backing is intended to help Nscale secure the funding needed for construction work and power infrastructure at the American site.
Under the proposed residual value guarantee mechanism, Nvidia would step in and assume temporary control of the facility if Nscale defaults on its construction payment commitments. The chipmaker would then help find a buyer and a replacement tenant to take over the project.
The arrangement effectively makes the world's most valuable semiconductor company a financial guarantor for a supplier that builds facilities for one of its key customers. Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, California, designs the graphics processors that power modern generative artificial intelligence.
Anthropic campus in West Virginia
The scale of the project is substantial. Anthropic has signed a contract with Nscale for the campus's first building valued at $44.6 billion, with a planned power capacity of 460 megawatts. That facility is slated to rely on Nvidia's upcoming Vera Rubin artificial intelligence chips as its computational engine.
The companies are also negotiating terms for a second building at the West Virginia site that carries an estimated cost of approximately $45 billion.
However, Nscale remains far from the scale needed for such operations. In August, the British company had around 25,000 modern artificial intelligence accelerators in service, despite public goals of deploying nearly 500,000 chips.
The West Virginia development has also run into delays and environmental complications. Runoff from the construction site repeatedly flooded nearby homes, and the property only secured state certification in September.
Nvidia infrastructure financing push
The negotiations mark a new chapter in Nvidia's strategy to directly finance the physical infrastructure of its customer base. The company's previous backing for cloud providers centered primarily on leasing computing capacity and purchasing silicon hardware, rather than underwriting construction costs.
According to The Information, Nvidia's overall investments and loan support for specialized cloud providers and major clients have reached roughly $170 billion. In September, the chip designer also agreed to provide Nscale with $1 billion in convertible debt financing.
Such funding is aimed at so-called neoclouds, which are specialized cloud hosting providers that rent out high-performance hardware specifically optimized for training and running artificial intelligence models.
Neocloud market volatility
Nvidia's financial intervention comes as Wall Street grows increasingly skeptical about whether specialized cloud operators can earn a return on their massive capital investments. In October, share prices for rival neocloud firms CoreWeave, Nebius, and IREN all dropped by more than 30 percent.
Nscale is currently preparing for an initial public offering that could value the business at up to $35 billion, but the company is already facing operational headwinds elsewhere. Earlier this month, Microsoft canceled plans for a projected Nscale data center in the United Kingdom after the site's electrical grid connection was postponed until the 2030s.
The debt guarantee from Nvidia remains under negotiation and has not been finalized. If completed, the deal would tighten financial links between the two firms, helping Nscale raise the construction capital it needs while ensuring Nvidia protects a massive order pipeline for its future processors.
