Nvidia Wants to Cosign the Loans for Anthropic's $45 Billion Data Center as Bond Markets Shut Out Nscale

Nvidia is in talks to do something it has rarely done for an AI cloud company: stand behind the construction loans. The building in question is the one Anthropic signed up for in West Virginia, in a deal worth about $45 billion, and its developer, Nscale, still does not have the money to build it.

The Information broke the news on Thursday, and Reuters picked it up the next day. Nothing is signed and the terms could change. Nscale declined to comment to Bloomberg, and Nvidia did not respond.

A cosigner for a customer

The proposed structure is a residual value guarantee on the 460MW building. If Nscale missed its construction payments, Nvidia would step in, temporarily take over the facility, and help find a buyer and a new tenant. It would also help cover electricity and construction costs.

Nvidia's earlier support for cloud providers mostly covered leases and chip purchases. Construction would be new territory. So would the degree of circularity: the building is expected to run Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which means Nvidia's balance sheet would be helping keep a buyer of Nvidia chips alive. Nvidia already holds a stake in Nscale, committed $1 billion in convertible financing to it in September, and has extended roughly $170 billion in investments and credit support across neoclouds and large customers, by The Information's count.

Why Nscale needs the help

The Anthropic contract is enormous for a company this size. Nscale's IPO filing puts it at $44.6 billion, more than 40% of a $103 billion revenue backlog, and the two sides are discussing a second deal of about the same size for another building.

The filings also contain the catch. Nscale has not secured the money to build or equip that first building, and Anthropic can walk away if financing is not in place by a set deadline. In the first half of 2026, Nscale lost $1 billion on revenue of $141 million. Our earlier look at its IPO filing found a very different customer picture, with ByteDance's Spring unit behind about 73% of 2025 revenue.

Getting that money has become harder. The Wall Street Journal reports that CoreWeave, Nebius and Nscale have effectively been shut out of the bond market in recent weeks, and shares of CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN had each fallen more than 30% in October as of late last month. Nvidia and other possible backers demanded stricter terms once markets turned, delaying Nscale's revised prospectus. The company is now leaning toward a December listing, and some bankers warn it is unlikely to reach the $30 billion to $35 billion valuation it wanted.

Floods, gas engines and less sleep

The physical buildout looks no calmer. Nscale had about 25,000 advanced AI chips running in August, against nearly 500,000 planned. At the Monarch Compute Campus, runoff flooded nearby homes more than once, state regulators ordered construction stopped for three days in September, and the site collected 10 notices of violation for poor stormwater controls. A person close to the company blamed extreme weather and said the damage had been fixed. The first 2GW phase is due to run on 864 gas-fired engines.

Microsoft also pulled out of a planned Nscale site in England in October after grid power was pushed into the 2030s. Chief executive Josh Payne told staff demand remained "insatiable."

Jensen Huang's advice, when asked in October about Nscale's trouble getting data centers online, was to "work around the clock." He added: "Try less sleep, which is what I do."

Anthropic has reasons of its own to care. It filed to go public last week, and Blackstone has warned investors that it may receive a below-investment-grade credit rating after its IPO, which would raise its borrowing costs. One investor told The Information that Anthropic's involvement likely explains Nvidia's interest in the first place.

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