Wire reporting: (Reuters, via CNA)

Nvidia is in talks to guarantee billions of dollars of debt for AI cloud company Nscale’s planned West Virginia data center that Anthropic has contracted to use, TechCrunch reported, citing The Information and later corroboration from Bloomberg^1,7.

The arrangement under discussion is a residual-value guarantee: if Nscale defaulted on construction payments, Nvidia would temporarily take over the facility and help find a buyer and new tenant, TechCrunch said, citing The Information¹.

Anthropic has signed a $44.6 billion contract covering the first 460-megawatt building at the campus, expected to use Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips, according to Nscale’s IPO filing as reported by TechCrunch^1,7.

TechCrunch said the companies are also discussing a second deal worth about $45 billion for another building¹.

Unlike Nvidia’s earlier support for cloud providers, which TechCrunch said mostly covered leases and chip purchases, the proposed guarantee would extend to electricity and construction costs¹.

Nscale is seeking to go public at a valuation of up to $35 billion, TechCrunch reported, while The Information, as summarized by TechCrunch, put Nvidia’s broader investments and credit support to neoclouds and large customers at about $170 billion, including $1 billion in convertible financing committed to Nscale in September¹.

The West Virginia project, described on Techmeme via the Financial Times as the 2,250-acre, 8-gigawatt Monarch Compute Campus, has faced construction problems, local opposition, and financing risk¹¹.

TechCrunch said runoff from the construction site has flooded nearby homes more than once, that the project won state certification in September, and that Microsoft this month pulled out of a planned Nscale site in England after grid power was delayed into the 2030s¹.

TechCrunch also said Nscale had about 25,000 advanced AI chips running in August, a fraction of nearly 500,000 it plans to deploy, citing the Financial Times¹.

Separately, outlets clustered around Anthropic’s public filing and a reported $63 billion package to finance Broadcom chips for Anthropic, which is a different financing path than the Nvidia-Nscale talks^4,6,9,10.

Whether Nvidia will complete a guarantee, on what terms, and whether Nscale can deliver the West Virginia campus on schedule were not confirmed on the record in the accounts reviewed^1,7.