The guarantee would help Nscale finance electricity and construction costs at the campus, whose first 460-megawatt building is expected to use Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips. Nvidia's past backing of cloud providers has generally been limited to leases and chip purchases rather than construction, which makes this a broader form of support. The chipmaker has extended roughly $170 billion in investments and credit support to neoclouds and large customers, per The Information, including $1 billion in convertible financing committed to Nscale in September.

Nscale is trying to list at a valuation of up to $35 billion even as doubts grow about whether it can deliver on its plans. It had roughly 25,000 advanced AI chips in operation in August, well short of the nearly 500,000 it intends to deploy, and Microsoft pulled out of a planned Nscale site in England this month after grid power for it was pushed into the 2030s. The West Virginia site has also had local problems: runoff from construction has flooded nearby homes more than once, though the project won state certification in September.

One investor suggested to The Information that Anthropic's involvement is probably why Nvidia wants to keep the project on track. Anthropic, which filed to go public this week, faces its own financing questions: Blackstone has warned investors it may receive a below-investment-grade credit rating after its IPO, which would raise its borrowing costs. Neoclouds, which rent out AI computing power without a cash-rich core business behind them, are under investor pressure, with CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN shares each down more than 30% in October as of last week, CNBC reported.