Nvidia Weighs Guaranteeing Debt for Nscale’s Anthropic Data Center

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Nvidia is in talks to guarantee billions of dollars of debt for Nscale, the British AI cloud company building a giant West Virginia data center for Anthropic, The Information reported on Thursday, Oct. 29, 2026; Bloomberg later confirmed the talks. The Nvidia Nscale guarantee would back construction and power costs for the first 460-megawatt building at the Monarch Compute Campus, which Anthropic has contracted to rent under agreements worth up to $44.6 billion. Nothing has been signed, and the terms could change, according to the reports.

Key figures: up to $44.6B Anthropic contract · 460 MW first building · $103.4B total contract value · 25,000 of 461,000 GPUs running

How the Nvidia guarantee would work

The proposal is a residual value guarantee. If Nscale missed construction payments, Nvidia would step in, take over the facility for a time and help find a buyer and a new tenant, TechCrunch reported, summarizing The Information. In effect, the chipmaker would be co-signing a customer’s construction loans. Nvidia’s earlier help for cloud providers has mostly covered leases and chip purchases rather than buildings.

The first building is slated to run Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, according to Nscale’s own Form S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That filing says Nscale signed the Anthropic deal on Aug. 25, 2026, as four separate services agreements, and that the payments depend on Nscale meeting delivery and service-availability requirements. The companies are also negotiating a second deal of roughly $45 billion for another building.

Nvidia is already an Nscale investor and committed $1 billion in convertible financing to the company in September, TechCrunch reported. The Information has tallied about $170 billion in investments and credit support that Nvidia has extended to neoclouds and other large customers. One investor told The Information that Anthropic’s role likely explains why Nvidia wants the project kept on track. Nscale declined to comment to Bloomberg, and Nvidia did not respond.

By the numbers: a big backlog, little of it live

Nscale’s filing shows a business built mostly on signed promises. As of Aug. 31, 2026, it reported $103.4 billion of active and contracted total contract value (TCV), up from $38.0 billion at the end of 2025. That is a jump of $65.4 billion, or about 172%, in eight months, by TBR’s calculation from the S-1.

The live portion is far smaller. Active TCV was $2.6 billion, roughly 2.5% of the total. The Anthropic agreements alone equal about 43% of the full backlog, by TBR’s math, which lines up with the Financial Times’ description of the deal as more than 40% of Nscale’s book. On hardware, the company had about 25,000 GPUs running against 461,000 active and contracted, meaning about 5.4% of the planned fleet was online.

Revenue is growing fast from a low base. Nscale reported $140.6 million for the first half of 2026, up 1,252% from $10.4 million a year earlier, according to the S-1. It lost about $1 billion over the same six months, the FT reported.

Financing pressure and a delayed IPO

The talks come as lenders pull back from AI cloud builders. Nscale has said in its IPO filings that it has not yet secured the money to build or equip the first building, and Anthropic can walk away if that financing is not in place by a set deadline, the FT reported, as summarized by The Next Web. The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia and other potential backers began demanding stricter terms after markets turned, which has delayed a revised prospectus. Nscale is now leaning toward a December listing instead of November, and some of its bankers have warned it is unlikely to reach the $30 billion to $35 billion valuation it had targeted, the Journal reported.

The wider sector has been under strain. CoreWeave, Nebius and Nscale have effectively been shut out of the bond market in recent weeks, according to the WSJ. In mid-October, AI debt fears helped hand the Nasdaq its worst week since June. Earlier this month, Microsoft pulled out of Nscale’s Loughton site in England.

Trouble on the ground in West Virginia

The Mason County campus, which Nscale acquired in March through its purchase of American Intelligence & Power Corp., covers about 2,250 acres and is planned to reach 2 gigawatts of gross power generation by the first half of 2028, the S-1 says. That first phase will run on 864 gas-fired engines, the FT reported. State regulators halted construction for three days in September after runoff flooded nearby homes, and the project has drawn 10 notices of violation for weak stormwater controls. A person close to Nscale told the FT that extreme weather caused the flooding and that the company followed every order and repaired the damage.

Asked this month about Nscale’s struggle to bring data centers online, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the company to “work around the clock,” adding, “Try less sleep, which is what I do,” the FT reported.

Sources

• TechCrunch: Nvidia weighs playing the cosigner for Nscale’s AI data center in West Virginia (Oct. 30, 2026)
• Nscale Form S-1 registration statement, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (Sept. 18, 2026)
• The Next Web: Nvidia in talks to guarantee debt for Nscale’s Anthropic data centre (Oct. 31, 2026)
• Reuters via StreetInsider: Nvidia in talks to give credit support for Nscale’s deal with Anthropic (Oct. 29, 2026)