NVIDIA is in advanced talks to provide a roughly $250 billion financing guarantee for OpenAI as the ChatGPT maker pursues a 10-gigawatt data center complex in southern Ohio, according to The Wall Street Journal’s report. The proposed backstop would rank among the most ambitious financial arrangements of the artificial intelligence boom, but it remains under negotiation and may never be completed on the terms currently being discussed.
The guarantee would help OpenAI lease the project from SB Energy, the energy subsidiary of Japan’s SoftBank. Including the advanced chips expected to fill the campus, the total development could cost more than $500 billion, making it the largest data center project announced to date.
The talks show how the AI race is expanding beyond chips and models into increasingly complex financing. NVIDIA would not simply be selling processors to OpenAI. It would be using its financial strength to help a major customer secure the debt and long-term leasing commitments needed to build the infrastructure that will eventually consume those processors.
A Backstop, Not a Direct $250 Billion Investment
The proposed guarantee should not be confused with a direct equity investment or a transfer of $250 billion in cash. It would instead support financing vehicles intended to reassure lenders that the lease and debt obligations behind the Ohio campus can be met.
That distinction matters because OpenAI does not have an investment-grade credit rating and remains unprofitable despite its rapid revenue growth and a reported valuation of about $852 billion. Its value has risen sharply since an earlier share sale priced the company at $500 billion, but the infrastructure commitments required to train and serve frontier models are growing even faster.
The $250 billion backstop would cover the data center lease and associated debt financing, according to the report. It would not pay for the NVIDIA systems installed inside the campus. The chipmaker is separately discussing financing of as much as $350 billion to help OpenAI purchase the hardware required for the project.
If both arrangements move forward at their maximum reported size, NVIDIA could become deeply exposed to the same customer through financing guarantees, chip sales, and investment ties. For OpenAI, the structure could lower borrowing costs and provide access to infrastructure that would otherwise be difficult to finance on acceptable terms.
The first phase of the Ohio project is expected to begin operating in 2028 with about 800 megawatts of capacity. The longer-term plan calls for 10 gigawatts, an enormous amount of power even by the standards of hyperscale data centers.
The campus is expected to span federal and private land. Its power supply would be controlled by the U.S. government and funded separately by Japan through a recent trade arrangement tied to a planned $33 billion natural gas facility. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is reportedly involved in determining which companies will receive access.
OpenAI has shown the strongest interest in leasing the site, but it is not the only possible customer. Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have also spoken with U.S. officials about the project, illustrating how scarce power and construction-ready land have become strategic assets in the AI industry.
NVIDIA Moves Deeper Into AI Finance
The talks fit a wider shift in NVIDIA’s business model. As the cost of AI infrastructure rises, the company is increasingly helping customers finance the systems needed to buy or rent its chips. Business Insider recently reported that NVIDIA has developed guarantee arrangements for specialized AI cloud providers whose customers lack investment-grade credit.
Those agreements resemble an insurance product. NVIDIA can promise to step in if a customer stops paying, helping an infrastructure provider obtain financing that banks might otherwise reject. In return, NVIDIA secures chip demand and may receive a share of the resulting revenue.
The approach can expand the market for NVIDIA hardware, particularly as large cloud providers design more chips of their own. It also raises concerns about circular financing, where a supplier helps fund the customers that buy its products. The risk is not necessarily that the structure exists, but that it could support capacity without enough genuine demand or transfer losses back to NVIDIA if a customer fails.
OpenAI and NVIDIA already have unusually intertwined interests. In 2025, the companies outlined a plan under which NVIDIA could invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI while supplying at least 10 gigawatts of computing systems. OpenAI would use part of the investment to purchase NVIDIA hardware, prompting analysts to question how much economic risk was truly being transferred.
At the same time, OpenAI has worked to avoid dependence on a single chip supplier. It has signed an AMD deal covering a multi-year deployment and the potential acquisition of a stake in the chipmaker, while also developing custom processors with Broadcom.
OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman has repeatedly argued that compute capacity will determine which companies can build the most advanced AI systems. “Everything starts with compute,” he said when OpenAI and NVIDIA announced their earlier infrastructure partnership.
The latest talks suggest that the next constraint may be financing as much as engineering. Building AI campuses at this scale requires not only GPUs, power, cooling, land, and grid connections, but also counterparties capable of supporting decades of lease payments and hundreds of billions of dollars in debt.
Technology companies are expected to spend more than $700 billion on AI infrastructure this year. That expansion has already pushed cloud providers, chipmakers, private credit funds, governments, and energy companies into arrangements that increasingly resemble project finance for power stations or national infrastructure.
NVIDIA, OpenAI, and the U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately comment on the reported negotiations, and Reuters said it could not independently verify the Journal’s account. The size, timing, and final structure could therefore change substantially.
Even so, the talks offer a view of where the AI buildout is heading. NVIDIA is no longer only the industry’s dominant chip supplier. It is increasingly becoming a financier and risk-sharing partner for the infrastructure needed to sustain demand for those chips. If the Ohio guarantee proceeds, that transformation would reach a scale without precedent in the technology sector.
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