The guarantee is still only a talk

At 09:20 Beijing time on 31 October 2026, TechCrunch published a report on Nvidia and Nscale. The page shows 6:20 p.m. Pacific on 30 October, the same instant as the timestamp 2026-10-31T01:20:05+00:00. Nvidia is in talks to guarantee billions of dollars of debt financing for the West Virginia data center that the cloud provider Nscale is planning for Anthropic. The Information reported the talks on Thursday, and Bloomberg later corroborated that report. Citing Nscale's IPO filing, the article says Anthropic has signed a $44.6 billion contract for the project's first building alone. The piece describes the chipmaker as co-signing a customer's loans. The guarantee itself is still talks, not a signed commitment in this article. The date inside the web address is still 30 October. This column follows the Pacific clock printed beside the headline and the UTC timestamp in the page metadata. Those two clocks name one moment.

The proposed arrangement would help Nscale finance electricity and construction at the West Virginia campus. The article calls the structure a residual value guarantee: if Nscale defaulted on construction payments, Nvidia would temporarily take over the facility and help find a buyer and a new tenant. That description is attributed to The Information. TechCrunch adds a contrast. Earlier support from Nvidia for cloud providers mostly covered leases and chip purchases, not construction. Nscale is seeking to go public at a valuation of up to $35 billion. The same passage says concern is growing about whether the company can deliver the data-center projects. The valuation is a ceiling being sought, not a completed offer price.

The Anthropic contract covers the first 460-megawatt building on the campus. The article says that building is expected to use Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips. The companies are also discussing a second deal, worth roughly $45 billion, for another building. That second figure is a discussion, and the article does not present it as a signed contract. In August, Nscale had about 25,000 advanced AI chips running, against a plan to deploy nearly 500,000. Runoff from the construction site has flooded nearby homes more than once. In September, after months of negotiations, the project won state certification. This month, Microsoft pulled out of a planned Nscale site in England after grid power for it was pushed into the 2030s.

Investments and credit support from Nvidia to neoclouds and large customers come to roughly $170 billion, according to The Information as cited here, including $1 billion of convertible financing committed to Nscale in September. Shares of CoreWeave, Nebius, and IREN had each fallen more than 30 percent in October as of last week, the article says, citing CNBC. One unnamed investor told The Information that Anthropic's involvement likely explains Nvidia's interest in keeping the project on track. Anthropic filed to go public this week. Blackstone has warned investors that Anthropic may receive a below-investment-grade credit rating after the IPO. The article says such a rating would raise borrowing costs and could leave the company relying on stronger partners to back its debt.

The $44.6 billion contract, the $35 billion valuation ceiling, the chip counts, the $170 billion figure, and the three share declines are numbers this TechCrunch article relays. The IPO filing, The Information, Bloomberg, and CNBC were not opened for this column. The guarantee remains a negotiation. The second building remains a deal under discussion. Thursday's original report has no clock in this article beyond the word Thursday. The flooding and the England exit are citations of other reports inside this piece. The photograph is the Getty image TechCrunch used: a phone showing the Nscale mark, not the West Virginia site.