Nvidia Considers Writing the Biggest Backstop Yet: A Guarantee on the Data Center Anthropic Rented for $44.6 Billion

Nvidia's support for the AI cloud sector has moved from chips to equity to credit, and now to something closer to insurance. The Information reported, and TechCrunch followed up, that Nvidia is in talks to guarantee billions of dollars in debt financing for Nscale, the UK-based AI cloud provider building a data center campus in West Virginia whose first building is leased to Anthropic. The talks are described by people familiar with the matter as ongoing; no agreement has been signed and terms could still change.

The structure under discussion is unusual. Rather than backing a customer lease or a chip purchase, the guarantee would be a residual-value commitment on the data center assets themselves, aimed at the power infrastructure and civil construction of the site. If Nscale failed to keep up construction payments, Nvidia would step in to repay the debt, take temporary control of the facility, and help arrange its sale or re-lease to another tenant. The idea is to let Nscale borrow at investment-grade terms against a project it could not finance on its own.

The scale of the underlying project explains why anyone would bother. According to Nscale's IPO filing, Anthropic has signed a $44.6 billion contract for the first building of the Monarch Compute Campus alone - a 460MW facility slated to be filled with Nvidia's newest Vera Rubin GPUs. One source told reporters that Anthropic also plans to sign for a second building at the campus on roughly similar terms. Industry estimates put the civil construction cost of a 1GW-capable data center frame at around $12 billion, which would make Nvidia's potential guarantee on the 460MW first phase worth well over $5 billion - an estimate, not a disclosed figure.

If the deal closes, Nvidia would hold three roles in the same transaction chain: supplier of the chips inside the building, equity investor in the cloud provider operating it, and backstop for the debt that builds it. The Financial Times, in a recent deep dive into the 2,250-acre, 8GW Monarch campus, documented construction problems, local opposition and financing risks hanging over the project - exactly the kind of exposure a residual-value guarantee is designed to paper over, or absorb.

The talks fit a wider pattern. Nvidia has extended roughly $170 billion in credit support and investments across the AI cloud sector, backing neocloud providers including Nscale, CoreWeave and Firmus, whose buildouts have been financed with debt that still needs refinancing as it comes due. Just last week, media reports said Nvidia was weighing an investment of several hundred million dollars in Australia's Firmus, which abruptly withdrew its IPO earlier this month.

The circularity has long drawn criticism - Nvidia selling chips to customers it finances, whose revenue comes largely from renting those chips to a handful of anchor tenants. A residual-value guarantee tightens the loop further: the chipmaker's balance sheet would now sit directly under the concrete and steel. For Anthropic, whose IPO filing lists tens of billions in largely non-cancelable compute commitments, the arrangement makes the supply it depends on harder to disrupt. For Nvidia, each new layer of support raises the same question from a different angle: how much of the AI buildout is underwritten by one company's stock.