Nvidia is in talks to provide roughly $250 billion in financing guarantees for OpenAI, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. The backstop would let OpenAI lease a 10-gigawatt campus in southern Ohio that SoftBank’s energy subsidiary is developing.
The reason such a guarantee is needed is straightforward: OpenAI does not have an investment-grade credit rating. Nvidia’s balance sheet would effectively stand in for one, letting lenders price the debt against the chipmaker’s credit rather than the borrower’s.
What the money covers
The $250 billion figure applies to the data centre lease and construction debt, not to the Nvidia chips that will fill the building. Those are the subject of a separate discussion, with the Journal reporting chip purchase financing that could reach a further $350 billion.
The whole project is expected to cost more than $500 billion including silicon. Its first phase, around 800 megawatts, is due for completion in 2028.
Nvidia’s backing would support financing vehicles designed to reassure lenders about the project’s funding. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report, and Nvidia, OpenAI, and the US Commerce Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Why the site is political
The power for the Ohio campus is controlled by the US government and funded separately by Japan under a recent trade deal, tied to Tokyo’s pledge to invest $33 billion in a natural gas plant. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is involved in deciding who gets access.
OpenAI has been in advanced talks for the site for several weeks and is among the keenest bidders. Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have also approached Lutnick in recent weeks, according to the Journal.
The circularity problem
Michael Burry, the investor known for shorting the housing market before 2008, posted on X: “Around and around we go. Nvidia to guarantee $200 billion of ChatGPT’s spending on $NVDA chips.” He had added to his Nvidia short position on Friday at $210.28.
Tech commentator Ed Zitron was blunter, calling it “such an insane thing to do on so many levels and about as bearish as it gets, especially considering it is being built by SoftBank.” Both were reacting to the same structural feature: a chip supplier underwriting its customer’s ability to keep buying chips.
Nvidia has already committed more than $40 billion to AI equity positions, including roughly $30 billion in OpenAI. Its investment in Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence is arguably the purest version of the pattern, in which Nvidia funds companies that then spend the money on Nvidia hardware.
A structure with precedent
Vendor guarantees on data centre obligations are no longer unusual, though the scale here is. Google has guaranteed roughly $44 billion of other companies’ data centre rent, a figure the proposed Nvidia backstop would exceed by nearly six times.
OpenAI’s own capital structure has become increasingly layered. Eight banks are now backing SoftBank’s record $40 billion OpenAI loan, and SoftBank has separately sought margin lending secured against its OpenAI stake.
Much of this obligation sits outside conventional debt disclosure. Research has put Big Tech’s off-balance-sheet AI commitments at around $1.65 trillion, with Meta alone accounting for roughly $420 billion, nearly triple its reported debt.
What OpenAI gets out of it
For OpenAI, the deal would be a first move towards owning its compute rather than renting it from Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle. Control over infrastructure is the difference between negotiating capacity and dictating it.
For Nvidia, the calculation is demand certainty. Guaranteeing the building locks in years of chip orders from a customer that would otherwise struggle to finance them, which is precisely why critics find the arrangement uncomfortable.
The scale question
AI infrastructure spending is set to exceed $700 billion this year, and the industry is expected to spend more than $3 trillion through 2028 on data centres, much of it financed against the chips inside them. The central risk is not that AI fails to matter, but that the buildout overshoots demand or that returns get competed away faster than the debt amortises.
Nothing has been signed. The Journal noted the talks about the site and its financing remain in progress and subject to change, which for a $250 billion guarantee is a considerable caveat.
