Nvidia weighs guaranteeing billions of dollars in loans for 460-megawatt data center
Key Facts
Nvidia is in talks to provide billions of dollars in credit guarantees for loans to finance construction of a 460-megawatt data center, according to a report cited by Newsquawk from The Information on October 29. No final agreement has been announced, and the value or terms of the guarantees have not been disclosed. The financing discussions come as Nscale expands its AI computing contracts and needs funding for the infrastructure required to fulfill them. The report does not identify the center’s location or establish that it is the second facility Nscale discussed with Anthropic in a separate report. The proposed loan guarantees therefore remain a financing option under consideration, separate from signed contracts or deals still under negotiation.
On October 19, Reuters reported that Nscale was in talks to sell Anthropic computing capacity at a second facility at the Monarch campus in West Virginia, and that details of the talks could change. A source told the agency that the proposed facility would provide 460 megawatts of computing capacity using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips. Neither company confirmed the report to Reuters. The matching capacity figure in the guarantees report is not enough to establish that the two centers are the same project, since the first report did not identify the location of the center whose loans Nvidia may support. Talks over the second computing contract also remain separate from the service agreements Nscale signed with Anthropic in August.
On August 25, Nscale signed four separate agreements to provide dedicated GPU infrastructure to Anthropic at the Monarch campus. The agreements provide for potential aggregate payments of up to about 44.6 billion dollars, subject to delivery requirements and service availability. But Nscale’s filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said the company had not, as of the filing date, secured binding financing commitments to fund performance under those agreements. The company said it was working on a financing plan involving multiple sources. The agreements allow termination if Nscale does not obtain qualifying financing by the deadline or a later date agreed by the parties, tying the funding directly to the continuation of its contractual obligations.
Nscale’s financial results highlight the gap between the scale of its contracts and the revenue generated so far. The company reported revenue of 140.6 million dollars in the first half of 2026, compared with 10.4 million dollars in the same period of 2025, a year-on-year increase of 1,252%. The company attributed much of the growth to making new deployments available to customers. The figures show that expanding computing capacity and delivering it to customers remain essential to converting agreements into revenue. In this context, Nscale announced on August 31 that it had closed delayed-draw term loan facilities with total commitments of nearly 3 billion dollars to fund GPU infrastructure deployments at two U.S. sites.
The facilities announced by Nscale include up to 1.85 billion dollars in financing for the Ward County site in Texas and up to 1.2 billion dollars for the Madison site in North Carolina. Those announced loans differ from the potential Nvidia guarantees for the data center under discussion, but show that the company is using more than one route to finance its infrastructure deployment. More broadly, Nvidia disclosed in its quarterly report memoranda of understanding with capital providers to establish independent financing platforms for AI infrastructure. The company said the platforms were designed to mobilize more than 500 billion dollars in external capital over time. It added that preliminary arrangements of this kind may not result in final agreements, and that potential support may be limited to the residual value of specific projects.
Expansion plans face risks tied to electricity availability and facility operating timelines. Reuters reported that Microsoft withdrew from an agreement that would have made it the main tenant at Nscale’s Essex center after being told that power supplies to the site might not begin until the 2030s. Microsoft confirmed that its partnership with Nscale continued, but the power delay highlights the challenge of turning data center projects into capacity available when needed. Reuters also reported that investor concerns about debt-funded expansion were reinforced by a decline in Nscale rival CoreWeave’s shares, amid concern about its 50 billion dollars in debt. Nvidia shares closed at 213.66 dollars on October 29, after closing at 215.38 dollars in the previous session.