Nvidia Weighs Cosigning a Customer's Data Center Loans: Anthropic's First Building Deal Is Worth $44.6 Billion
Nvidia is in talks to guarantee billions of dollars in debt financing for AI cloud provider Nscale's planned Anthropic data center in West Virginia, TechCrunch reported, citing The Information and corroborated by Bloomberg. Anthropic has signed a $44.6 billion contract for the project's first building alone, according to Nscale's IPO filing. In essence, the chipmaker would be co-signing a customer's loans.
The proposed arrangement would help Nscale secure financing for the electricity and construction costs of its West Virginia campus. Under what is known as a residual value guarantee, Nvidia would step in if Nscale defaulted on construction payments, temporarily take over the facility, and help find a buyer and a new tenant. Nvidia's earlier support for cloud providers has mostly covered leases and chip purchases, not construction, so the guarantee would mark a deeper level of involvement.
Anthropic's contract with Nscale covers the first 460-megawatt building at the West Virginia campus, which is expected to use Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips. The companies are also discussing a second deal worth roughly $45 billion for another building. Nscale is seeking to go public at a valuation of up to $35 billion, despite growing concerns about its ability to deliver on ambitious data center projects. Nvidia has extended roughly $170 billion in investments and credit support to neoclouds and large customers, according to The Information, including $1 billion in convertible financing committed to Nscale in September.
The talks come as investors grow increasingly jittery about the scale of spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure and whether it can generate returns quickly enough. Guaranteeing a customer's construction loans would help keep data center buildout plans afloat and secure a home for Nvidia's chips, while tying the chipmaker more tightly to its customers' financial risk.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：英伟达位于加州 Santa Clara 的总部大楼。Dllu，CC BY-SA 4.0，经维基共享资源。 / Nvidia's headquarters in Santa Clara, California. By Dllu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
