Nvidia is ready to cosign billions so Anthropic gets its data center

Nvidia is in talks to guarantee billions of dollars in someone else's loans. The money is for a data center that Nscale is building in West Virginia for Anthropic. The talks were first reported on Thursday and later confirmed by other outlets.

The setup is simple and a little alarming. If Nscale can't keep up with construction payments, Nvidia would temporarily take over the facility and then help find a buyer and a new tenant. Until now Nvidia's help for cloud providers has mostly covered leases and chip purchases, never construction.

The stakes are huge. Anthropic has already signed a $44.6 billion contract with Nscale, and that covers only the first 460 megawatt building on the campus, which is set to run Nvidia's next generation Vera Rubin chips. The companies are also discussing a second building worth roughly another $45 billion.

Nscale itself is not exactly cruising. In August it had about 25,000 AI chips running out of nearly 500,000 planned. Runoff from the West Virginia site has flooded nearby homes more than once, and the project only won state certification in September after months of talks. This month Microsoft walked away from a planned Nscale site in England after grid power there slipped into the 2030s. Nscale still wants to go public at a valuation of up to $35 billion.

This isn't new territory for Nvidia. By reporters' count it has already extended about $170 billion in investments and credit support to neoclouds and big customers, including $1 billion in convertible financing for Nscale in September. Shares of similar companies, CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN, each fell more than 30% in October alone.

Anthropic has its own worries. It filed to go public this week, and Blackstone has warned investors that the company could get a below investment grade credit rating after the IPO. That would make borrowing pricier and leave it leaning on strong backers like Nvidia.

Chips sell as long as someone can pay for them. Now Nvidia is paying for its buyers.