Nvidia in talks to back nScale's $45 bln Anthropic cloud deal, The Information says
The chipmaker would stand behind the financing of a customer's purchases from a customer, deepening a web of exposure that now runs through Anthropic's planned listing.
Nvidia is in talks to provide billions of dollars in credit support for nScale's $45 bln cloud deal with Anthropic, The Information reported. The company would be acting as guarantor of a customer's data-centre buildout, and not only as the supplier of the chips inside it.
That is a different position from the one it held when the talks first surfaced. Anthropic's negotiations with nScale were already known, as was a second building at nScale's Monarch complex, where Monarch 2 is expected to deliver 460 MW of compute power. What is new is who would carry the risk if the financing sours.
Nvidia already has plenty of it. It has said its exposure to Anthropic's contracted value stands at $180bn. Its money also sits behind other buyers of its own hardware: it has completed $10bln investments in OpenAI, committed $2bn to the Brookfield AI Fund, and backs Firmus, which is seeking $10bn for AI chip development ahead of a planned ASX listing. A credit guarantee adds a contingent liability to those stakes, and it ties Nvidia's balance sheet more tightly to the same few customers whose orders drive its sales.
Anthropic's own commitments explain why lenders want that comfort. It plans to spend more than $600bn on compute, the largest pledge yet disclosed by an AI lab, and its listing application sets a compute commitment of up to $120.58bn beside an offering of up to $100bn. Banks have been willing to lend, though not always to hold: Wall Street banks turned an earlier offer of up to $42bn into a committed facility for Broadcom chips bound for Anthropic, while JPMorgan and Goldman kept just $1.3bn of a $5bn loan to Volta Infrastructure.
The timing sharpens the point. Anthropic is targeting an IPO for the week of Nov. 16, and bankers will have to defend its growth assumptions against a financing chain in which the chip supplier lends its credit to the customer's landlord. Circular funding of this kind flatters demand. Investors should ask how much counterparty risk Nvidia is now absorbing, and what happens to it if the customers it backs falter.
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