Nvidia weighs guaranteeing debt for Nscale's $44.6 billion Anthropic data centre

Nvidia is in talks to guarantee billions of dollars in debt financing for AI cloud provider Nscale's planned data centre for Anthropic in West Virginia, TechCrunch reported on 30 October 2026, citing a report by The Information that it said Bloomberg later corroborated.

The deal on the table

• Anthropic has signed a $44.6 billion contract for the first building alone at Nscale's West Virginia campus, according to Nscale's IPO filing cited by TechCrunch.
• The first building is designed for 460 megawatts of capacity and is expected to use Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips; the companies are also discussing a second building worth roughly $45 billion, TechCrunch reported.
• Under the proposed arrangement, known as a residual value guarantee, Nvidia would step in if Nscale defaulted on construction payments, temporarily take over the facility and help find a buyer and new tenant, according to The Information as cited by TechCrunch.
• Nvidia has already extended roughly $170 billion in investments and credit support to neoclouds and large customers, including $1 billion in convertible financing committed to Nscale in September, TechCrunch reported.
• Nscale is seeking to go public at a valuation of up to $35 billion, but had only about 25,000 advanced AI chips running in August against a target of nearly 500,000, according to TechCrunch.

Why it matters

The talks show Nvidia extending its financial backing of the AI build-out beyond chip leases and purchases into construction debt itself, as investors grow wary of how heavily the sector's expansion depends on borrowing rather than equity — CNBC, as cited by TechCrunch, reported that shares of neocloud operators CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN had each fallen more than 30% in October as of last week. For the Caspian region and other jurisdictions courting data-centre investment, the arrangement is a reminder that even the best-financed AI infrastructure projects now rest on a small number of chipmaker-backed guarantees rather than diversified commercial lending, a concentration that regulators and state investors should weigh before extending comparable support of their own.