Wire reporting: (Reuters, via CNA)

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

The proposed structure is a residual value guarantee covering electricity and construction costs: if Nscale defaulted on construction payments, Nvidia would temporarily take over the facility and help find a buyer and tenant, according to The Information as relayed by TechCrunch¹.

Anthropic has signed a $44.6 billion contract for the project’s first 460-megawatt building, which is expected to use Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips, Nscale’s IPO filing said as cited by TechCrunch^1,7.

The companies are also discussing a second deal worth roughly $45 billion for another building, TechCrunch said¹.

Nvidia’s earlier support for cloud providers has mostly covered leases and chip purchases rather than construction, TechCrunch reported¹.

The Information, as cited by TechCrunch, put Nvidia’s investments and credit support to neoclouds and large customers at roughly $170 billion, including $1 billion in convertible financing committed to Nscale in September¹.

Nscale is seeking to go public at a valuation of up to $35 billion, TechCrunch said, while reporting that the company had about 25,000 advanced AI chips running in August, a fraction of nearly 500,000 it plans to deploy¹.

The West Virginia campus, described on Techmeme via the Financial Times as a 2,250-acre Monarch Compute Campus with as much as 8 gigawatts of planned power, has faced construction issues, local opposition and financing risk¹¹.

TechCrunch said runoff from the construction site has flooded nearby homes more than once and that the project won state certification in September after months of negotiations¹.

This month Microsoft pulled out of a planned Nscale site in England after grid power was pushed into the 2030s, TechCrunch reported¹.

A separate Anthropic financing track, carried by CNA from Reuters, described Bank of America, Blackstone, Citi and Morgan Stanley lining up $63 billion to buy Broadcom chips and networking gear through a special-purpose vehicle, with Broadcom providing residual-value support to senior lenders⁶.

Whether Nvidia and Nscale close a guarantee, and on what terms, has not been confirmed by the companies in the accounts reviewed here^1,7.