Nvidia is in talks to provide a roughly $250 billion guarantee for OpenAI as part of a vast data-centre scheme in southern Ohio.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal would help the ChatGPT outfit lease a 10-gigawatt project being cooked up by SoftBank’s energy subsidiary, SB Energy.
People familiar with the talks said the whole caper could cost more than $500 billion once Nvidia’s shiny AI chips are stuffed inside.
That would make it the largest data-centre project announced so far. The ‘lecky is controlled by the US government and funded separately by Japan under a recent trade deal.
US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick is involved in deciding who gets the juice, and Nvidia’s backing would let the developer borrow on better terms than it could with OpenAI standing alone.
OpenAI is still an unprofitable private company without an investment-grade credit rating, which tends to make lenders twitchy. The AI outfit has been in advanced talks to lease the site for several weeks, with Anthropic, Microsoft and Google also sniffing around.
AI companies are scrambling for chips and electricity, making government-backed megaprojects look tastier than another tedious cloud rental deal.
Under the proposed structure, Nvidia would guarantee a set of financing vehicles designed to reassure lenders that the funding is not made of smoke. The terms are not final and the whole thing could still collapse.
The $250 billion guarantee would cover the lease and debt for the build-out, but not the Nvidia chips inside the halls. Nvidia, which has already invested $30 billion in OpenAI, is discussing a separate chip-financing deal that could reach $350 billion.
The campus would need about 10 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power several million homes, and would take years to finish. The first phase is expected in 2028, with about 800 megawatts of power.
The Trump administration has plenty riding on the Ohio project, with Japan pledging $33 billion for a natural-gas power site on federal land. US officials hope using federal land at a decommissioned uranium-enrichment site about 50 miles south of Columbus will dodge local permitting bunfights.
SB Energy would operate the power plant for a fee, while Japan and the US split power sales until Japan recovers its $33 billion. After that, the US government would take 90 per cent of the revenue.
The structure shows Washington trying to hurry along critical industries by climbing directly into bed with private firms. It reflects a wider financing shift, where investment-grade tech giants wrap smaller AI outfits in their balance sheets.
Google has used similar backstops for Anthropic data centres, partly to shift more of its in-house tensor processing units. For OpenAI, the site would mark its first data centre as a tenant and move it closer to controlling infrastructure it mainly rents from cloud providers.
The company recently lifted its projected compute spending to about $750 billion through 2030, up from around $600 billion earlier this year.
OpenAI and Anthropic are racing towards IPOs with silly valuations, which means the pressure to keep growing is unlikely to ease.
