Nvidia in Talks to Back Debt for Nscale's Anthropic Data Center in West Virginia
Nvidia is in talks to guarantee billions of dollars in debt financing for Nscale's planned Anthropic data center in West Virginia, according to TechCrunch. Bloomberg first reported on October 29, 2026 that Nvidia was in discussions to provide credit guarantees for the facility.
The proposed support would help Nscale finance the electricity and construction costs of its West Virginia campus. The structure under discussion is a residual value guarantee, which works much like a co-signer on a loan. If Nscale defaulted on construction payments, Nvidia would step in, temporarily take over the facility, and help find a buyer and a new tenant. The talks are not final, and no terms have been agreed.
The campus is the Monarch Compute Campus, a 2,250-acre site in Mason County, West Virginia. Nscale describes it as having 1 GW of on-site power generation, scalable to more than 8 GW, and as the first state-certified Artificial Intelligence Microgrid in the United States. A microgrid is a local power network that can run on its own generation rather than relying entirely on the regional grid.
In March, Nscale, Microsoft, Nvidia and Caterpillar announced a collaboration to deliver 1.35 GW of Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs at the site. That same month Nscale said it had signed a letter of intent with Microsoft for 1.35 GW of AI compute capacity. Nscale and Caterpillar are also bringing DSX Vera Rubin reference designs to life on the multi-gigawatt site.
Anthropic's contract with Nscale covers the first 460 MW building on the campus, which is expected to use Vera Rubin chips. Nscale's IPO filing puts the contract at $44.6 billion for that building alone, according to the filing with the SEC. Reuters reported on October 19, 2026 that Nscale and Anthropic were in talks on a new deal worth about $45 billion, and that in August Anthropic had agreed to spend $45 billion renting AI cloud compute from the West Virginia campus. The two companies are now discussing a second deal of roughly $45 billion for another building.
Nscale is seeking to go public at a valuation of up to $35 billion. Its existing footprint includes data centers in Norway, Portugal, Texas and West Virginia. Nvidia committed $1 billion in convertible financing, a loan or bond that can later convert into equity, to Nscale in September, before the current talks on credit support.
The broader context here is the financing structure. A chip supplier that guarantees construction payments and takes over a facility on default would carry the tenancy and construction risk that a lender or developer would otherwise hold. Those are the terms the talks concern, and they have not been finalized. For a data center of this scale, power procurement and construction financing set the timeline for when capacity comes online, so the arrangement bears directly on schedule risk for the Vera Rubin deployment.
In my view, the more useful question for the industry is how many AI campuses can secure this kind of backing. Gigawatt-scale projects are being financed around a small group of anchor tenants, a handful of chip vendors, and a grid that has to deliver the power. If the Monarch campus proceeds as described, with on-site generation and a microgrid built for the load, it would show whether that combination can be built and financed outside the traditional utility and lender model. The outcome will depend on the final terms, the construction schedule and how the IPO valuation is received.
