Nvidia is negotiating a residual-value guarantee for Nscale's West Virginia data center campus, according to reporting by The Information and Bloomberg, a structure under which Nvidia would step in to find a buyer or tenant if the neocloud startup defaults on its construction financing.
The stakes are large: Anthropic has already signed a $44.6 billion contract, disclosed in Nscale's IPO filing, for the first 460-megawatt building on the site, expected to run Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, and a second roughly $45 billion deal for an additional building is reportedly under discussion. Nvidia has already extended about $170 billion in investment and credit support across so-called neocloud providers, including a $1 billion convertible-financing commitment to Nscale in September.
A build-out running ahead of itself
The guarantee talks come as Nscale's build-out shows signs of strain: as of August the company had deployed only about 25,000 of a planned 500,000 chips, construction runoff has reportedly flooded nearby homes, and Microsoft walked away from a separate Nscale site in the UK over delayed grid power. Shares of neocloud operators including CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN each fell more than 30 percent in October amid broader doubts about AI infrastructure spending.
Those doubts extend to Anthropic itself: Blackstone has separately warned that Anthropic may receive only a "junk," sub-investment-grade credit rating once it completes its initial public offering, which would raise its own borrowing costs. One investor told reporters that risk is likely a key reason Nvidia wants the West Virginia project de-risked before construction financing closes — effectively underwriting the AI boom's physical infrastructure even as its biggest customers' balance sheets come under scrutiny.
